
A Machine to Move Ocean and Earth
The Making of the Port of Los Angeles and America
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Narrated by:
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Jonathan Todd Ross
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By:
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James Tejani
About this listen
The Port of Los Angeles is all around us. Objects we use on a daily basis pass through it: furniture, apparel, electronics, automobiles, and much more. Yet despite its centrality to our world, the port and the story of its making have been neglected in histories of the United States. In A Machine to Move Ocean and Earth, historian James Tejani corrects that significant omission, charting the port's rise out of the mud and salt marsh of San Pedro estuary.
By the mid-nineteenth century, Americans had identified the West Coast as the republic's destiny, a gateway to the riches of the Pacific. Tejani demonstrates how San Pedro came to be seen as all-important to the nation's future. It was not virgin land, but dominated by powerful Mexican estates that would not be dislodged easily. Yet American scientists would wrest control of the estuary and set the scene for the violence, inequality, and engineering marvels to come.
San Pedro was no place for a harbor, Tejani reveals. The port was carved in defiance of nature, using new engineering techniques and massive mechanical dredgers. Tejani vividly describes how a wild coast was made into the engine of American power. A Machine to Move Ocean and Earth is must-listen for anyone who seeks to understand what the United States was, what it is now, and what it will be.
©2024 James Tejani (P)2024 TantorListeners also enjoyed...
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Story
For particularly brilliant theoretical physicists like James Clerk Maxwell, Paul Dirac, or Albert Einstein, the search for mathematical truths led to strange new understandings of the ultimate nature of reality. But what are these truths? What are the mysterious numbers that explain the universe? In Fantastic Numbers and Where to Find Them, the leading theoretical physicist and YouTube star Antonio Padilla takes us on an irreverent cosmic tour of nine of the most extraordinary numbers in physics, offering a startling picture of how the universe works.
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Exciting, Strange, Difficult = Meh
- By Michael on 05-23-23
By: Antonio Padilla
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Index, a History of The
- A Bookish Adventure from Medieval Manuscripts to the Digital Age
- By: Dennis Duncan
- Narrated by: Neil Gardner
- Length: 8 hrs and 9 mins
- Unabridged
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Most of us give little thought to the back of the book - it's just where you go to look things up. But as Dennis Duncan reveals in this delightful and witty history, hiding in plain sight is an unlikely realm of ambition and obsession, sparring and politicking, pleasure and play. In the pages of the index, we might find "Butchers, to be avoided", or "Cows that shite Fire", or even catch "Calvin in his chamber with a Nonne". Here, for the first time, is the secret world of the index: an unsung but extraordinary everyday tool, with an illustrious but little-known past.
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Maybe a book that should be read rather than listened to
- By Amazon Customer on 11-09-22
By: Dennis Duncan
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Mapping the Deep
- Innovation, Exploration, and the Dive of a Lifetime
- By: Dawn J. Wright, Kathryn D. Sullivan - foreword
- Narrated by: Gwen Steel, Dawn J. Wright
- Length: 5 hrs and 32 mins
- Unabridged
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Oceanographer Dawn Wright made history in 2022 when she became the first Black person to visit Challenger Deep, the deepest and most unexplored place on Earth—a trip that took her over 10,000 meters beneath the Pacific Ocean’s surface. We know less about the ocean floor than we do about the surface of the moon. To date, barely one-fifth of the seabed has been mapped in high resolution. As an ocean scientist and explorer, Dawn has made it her mission to change that.
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Narrator sounds like AI
- By Kindle Customer on 02-16-25
By: Dawn J. Wright, and others
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The Human Tide
- How Population Shaped the Modern World
- By: Paul Morland
- Narrated by: Zeb Soanes
- Length: 10 hrs and 40 mins
- Unabridged
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The rise and fall of the British Empire; the emergence of America as a superpower; the ebb and flow of global challenges from Nazi Germany, Imperial Japan, and Soviet Russia. These are the headlines of history, but they cannot be properly grasped without understanding the role that population has played. The Human Tide shows how periods of rapid population transition - a phenomenon that first emerged in the British Isles but gradually spread across the globe - shaped the course of world history.
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dry
- By Ralph C. on 05-02-19
By: Paul Morland
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Eagle Against the Sun
- The American War With Japan
- By: Ronald H. Spector
- Narrated by: Tom Perkins
- Length: 23 hrs and 26 mins
- Unabridged
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Spector reassesses US and Japanese strategy and offers some provocative interpretations. He shows that the dual advance across the Pacific by MacArthur and Nimitz was less a product of strategic calculation and more a pragmatic solution to bureaucratic, doctrinal, and public relations problems facing the Army and Navy. He also argues that Japan made its fatal error not in the Midway campaign but in abandoning its offensive strategy after that defeat and allowing itself to be drawn into a war of attrition.
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OK as an overview, but too little detail
- By Mike From Mesa on 03-21-22
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Around the World in Eighty Games
- From Tarot to Tic-Tac-Toe, Catan to Chutes and Ladders, a Mathematician Unlocks the Secrets of the World's Greatest Games
- By: Marcus du Sautoy
- Narrated by: Mark Elstob
- Length: 12 hrs and 36 mins
- Unabridged
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Spanning millennia, oceans and continents, countries and cultures, Around the World in Eighty Games gleefully explores how mathematics and games have always been deeply intertwined. Renowned mathematician Marcus du Sautoy investigates how games provided the first opportunities for deep mathematical insight into the world, how understanding math can help us play games better, and how both math and games are integral to human psychology and culture.
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Overall, a very entertaining read.
- By Matt on 11-13-23
By: Marcus du Sautoy
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Wild Chocolate
- Across the Americas in Search of Cacao's Soul
- By: Rowan Jacobsen
- Narrated by: Sam Rushton
- Length: 7 hrs and 39 mins
- Unabridged
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Chasing chocolate down the supply chain and back through history, Jacobsen travels the rainforests of the Amazon and Central America to find the chocolate makers, activists, and indigenous leaders who are bucking the system that long ago abandoned wild and heirloom cacao in favor of high-yield, low-flavor varietals preferred by Big Chocolate.
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A Gem!
- By Eliza Martin on 02-03-25
By: Rowan Jacobsen
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East West Street
- On the Origins of "Genocide" and "Crimes Against Humanity"
- By: Philippe Sands
- Narrated by: David Rintoul, Philippe Sands
- Length: 14 hrs and 24 mins
- Unabridged
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When human rights lawyer Philippe Sands received an invitation to deliver a lecture in the western Ukrainian city of Lviv, he began to uncover a series of extraordinary historical coincidences. It set him on a quest that would take him halfway around the world in an exploration of the origins of international law and the pursuit of his own secret family history, beginning and ending with the last day of the Nuremberg Trials.
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Outstanding!
- By lori on 05-07-18
By: Philippe Sands
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The Genesis Book
- The Story of the People and Projects That Inspired Bitcoin
- By: Aaron van Wirdum
- Narrated by: Christian Neale
- Length: 10 hrs and 33 mins
- Unabridged
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Bitcoin did not appear out of nowhere. For decades prior to Satoshi Nakamoto’s invention, a diverse group of computer scientists, privacy activists, and heterodox economists tried to create a digital form of money that could operate independently of government control. The Genesis Book tells the story of the people and projects that inspired the invention of the world’s first successful peer-to-peer electronic cash system.
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Very informative!
- By Amazon Customer on 03-24-25
By: Aaron van Wirdum
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The Field of Blood
- Violence in Congress and the Road to Civil War
- By: Joanne B. Freeman
- Narrated by: Joanne B. Freeman
- Length: 11 hrs and 19 mins
- Unabridged
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In The Field of Blood, Joanne B. Freeman recovers the long-lost story of physical violence on the floor of the US Congress. Drawing on an extraordinary range of sources, she shows that the Capitol was rife with conflict in the decades before the Civil War. Legislative sessions were often punctuated by mortal threats, canings, flipped desks, and all-out slugfests. When debate broke down, congressmen drew pistols and waved Bowie knives. One representative even killed another in a duel. Many were beaten and bullied in an attempt to intimidate them into compliance, particularly on the issue of slavery.
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fascinating look at an untold aspect of US.history
- By P. Cardella on 09-27-18
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Resistance
- The Underground War Against Hitler, 1939-1945
- By: Halik Kochanski
- Narrated by: Jennifer M. Dixon
- Length: 46 hrs and 15 mins
- Unabridged
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It's almost shocking to think that now, more than seventy years after the Nazi surrender in 1945, there is not a single volume that has attempted to unify the resistance movements that convulsed Europe during the brutal years of occupation. In her extraordinary work, Resistance, Halik Kochanski does just that, creating a prodigiously researched account that becomes the first to bring these disparate histories into a single narrative.
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Uneven in quality of depiction of various areas
- By K. T. Jukic on 05-17-23
By: Halik Kochanski
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Descent into Darkness
- Pearl Harbor, 1941, A Navy Diver's Memoir
- By: Edward C. Raymer
- Narrated by: Peter Johnson
- Length: 7 hrs and 24 mins
- Unabridged
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On December 7, 1941, as the great battleships Arizona, Oklahoma, and Utah lie paralyzed and burning in the aftermath of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. A crack team of U.S. Navy salvage divers headed by Edward C. Raymer are hurriedly flown to Oahu from the mainland. Their two-part orders are direct and straightforward: (1) rescue as many trapped sailors and Marines as possible, and (2) resurrect what remains of America's once mighty pacific fleet. Descent Into Darkness tells their story.
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A Massive Disappointment
- By Matthew on 10-14-15
By: Edward C. Raymer
What listeners say about A Machine to Move Ocean and Earth
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- K. Finley
- 01-11-25
Adventure, spirit, innovation and grit...fascinating!
I didn't realize how something I never really think about is actually a large part of my daily existence. This account really helps identify particIur historical threads in the fabric of our culture and society. Each detailed account woven together shows a picture of not just what happened, but gives some insight into the personal journey of the individual character. I really enjoyed this! Randomly I was also on a Jack London kick at the same time that I was introduced to James Tejani's book...(not that they are the same genre) they actually paired so well together in my mental space, keeping my mind tethered to the amazing and mystical spirit of adventure, exploration, discovery and innovation.
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- Ronald
- 04-15-25
Understanding hindered by the reader
The audiobook recounts an interesting and multi streamed story that would be a challenge to follow in a book, when one can page back and forth. Fort Yuma vs Fort Mojave. Which pass: Cajon, Tejon, Walker, San Gorgonio? Which military engineer? Which ship assigned to the coast survey? For me, the reader seemed to be sneering, ironic, or implying duplicity as he read, and he adopted a monotonous cadence that suggested to me he had not imbibed the account he was reading.
I ended up having to back up in 10 min increments over and over. When I finally finished listening, I felt the need to go right back to the introduction and start listening anew to really understand it this time. Also, listening to the audiobook while stopping to consult Google maps helped me grasp things on the second go round..
All in all, I found it to be a worthwhile addition to my understanding of Western history and the development of southern California. Listening to this volume made me want to read a good bio of Genl Edward Ord. I also learned a bit about the dangers of coastal storms in the 19th century, surveying, and geodesic mapping, worthy subjects. I guess I'd suggest to a friend that they take up the book, that this presentation was for me hard fully to assimilate in audio format.
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