An award-winning journalist chronicles the life of a Jewish immigrant-turned-financier who guided California industry into the modern age.
A San Francisco Chronicle Bestseller
2009 Best Book Award Winner, Northern California Independent Bookseller’s Association
“Impressively researched, engagingly told . . . does an excellent job of tracing Hellman’s career and sketches a crisp portrait of the glittering San Francisco Jewish community. [A] compelling account.” —Los Angeles Times
Towers of Gold is a vivid portrait of the financier who changed California forever. Attempted stagecoach robberies, an assassination attempt, bank runs, the Gold Rush, the 1906 earthquake—it’s all here in Frances Dinkelspiel’s meticulously researched and masterly crafted biography.
In Towers of Gold, the early days of California are seen through the life of Isaias Hellman, a Jewish immigrant who started out as a simple store owner only to become the president of Wells Fargo and other banks and California’s premier moneyman of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. Dinkelspiel brings to life the transformation of California from a frontier society whose economy was driven by the barter of hides and exchange of gold into a vibrant state with the strongest economy in the nation. Pivotal to this transformation, Hellman was a key figure in developing the banking, oil, transportation, education, water, and wine industries on the Pacific Coast, almost single-handedly bringing California into modernity.
“A thorough and compelling portrait of a hugely influential man whose role in the rise of California can hardly be overestimated.” —William Deverell, director of the Huntington-USC Institute of California and the West