Amazon.com Review Amazon Best of the Month, August 2009: How do you describe a 1,300-page book in 150 words? Start with adjectives (some of them opposites): vast, intrepid, passionate, and yes, sometimes dull, illuminating and infuriating, satirical and confessional, exhausting and exhaustive, dirty, fertile, and dry. William T. Vollmann, legendary for his huge, all-consuming books of fiction, history, and reporting, has spent much of the past ten years returning obsessively to one of the harshest but most contested territories in North America, the desert borderlands of southeastern California and northern Mexico he calls Imperial. Wading through water-use arcana, agri-booster archives, and centuries of colonial history; listening to lettuce farmers, motel clerks, and dance-hall hostesses; and crossing the border hundreds of times (while meeting those who cross via other means, and those who try to stop them), Vollmann has written an intensely personal fever dream of an encyclopedia that makes a strange, northern companion to last year's giant borderlands masterpiece, Roberto Bolano's 2666 . --Tom Nissley
From Publishers Weekly Signature Reviewed by Michael CoffeyThis is an exasperating, maddening, exhausting and inchorent book by the stunningly prolific Vollmann, who has really outdone himself. Eleven hundred pages plus endless endnotes about a single county in California is as perverse as Vollmann has dared be—which is saying a lot for a guy who has written a massive collection of tales about skinheads ( Rainbow Stories ), a seven-volume history of the settling of a measly continent ( Seven Dreams ) and another seven volumes on the history of violence ( Rising Up and Rising Down) . But a big book about one county? Well, it's not just any county. Imperial is the southeastern-most county in California, bordering with Mexico to the south and Arizona to the east, across the Colorado River. Is it a place deserving of this seemingly disproportionate chronicle? Today, it is a hot spot for illegal immigration, law enforcement action, drug trafficking, prostitution and sweatshop labor in maquilladoras , fetid border factories. It is a place, sure enough, where imperialism has made its mark. Over the past centuries, a lot of bad things have happened in El Centro, as the region is also called, and very little good, as Vollmann's excessive data-dump demonstrates ad nauseam. The Spanish came, murdered, plundered, left; America annexed; land grabs ensued and Colorado River water was illegally diverted westward to render a temporary agricultural paradise and make a few fortunes. As with most of his books, Vollmann has performed mind-boggling feats of research, gobbling up obscure and arcane texts about the Spanish conquests, hydrography, citrus cultivation, immigration, poverty rates, desalinization, drug use, human smuggling and exploitation of the weak by the wealthy in all its guises as it applies to this benighted, once beautiful desert region. If Vollmann has a point of view here, an axe to grind, it is that he is appalled by the power inequities and the subsequent suffering of the Mexicans, and he is moved by the latter's simple desire to have a better life. But gouts of a bleeding heart make for some viscous prose, and, as seldom happens with Vollmann, his emotions overcome his cool and his positions fray into incoherence. Vollmann's normally reliable narrative voice veers between tour guide–speak and backpacking sociologist, with the occasional lyrical paean to a lady of the night. As a result, Imperial County is a place that few will have the stomach to visit, and Imperial a book few will be willing to read. (powerHouse is publishing a book of 200 photographs Vollmann took during the course of his research: $55 [200p] ISBN 978-1-57687-489-9.) Photos, maps. (Aug.) Coffey is executive managing editor at PW .
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

motw/Imperial - William T. Vollmann.epub

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zlib/History/American Studies/Vollmann, William T/Imperial_1751296.epub

by William T. Vollmann

True Agency Publications

Viking Children's Books

powerHouse Multimedia

powerHouse Books

Penguin Books

Puffin Books

1st ed., Brooklyn, NY, New York State, 2009

United States, United States of America

First Edition, First Printing, 2009

New York, New York State, 2008

New York, United States, 2009

First Edition, US, 2009

New York, 2010

1, PS, 2009

lg_fict_id_529136

Memory of the World Librarian: Quintus

Includes bibliographical references.

Библиогр.: с. 1151-1265, 1271-1299

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<p><P><b>An epic study of an emblematic American region by one of our most celebrated writers</b><P>It sprawls across a stinking artificial sea, across the deserts, date groves, and labor camps of southeastern California, right across the Mexican border. For generations of migrant workers, from Okies fleeing the Dust Bowl of the 1930s to Mexican laborers today, Imperial County has held the promise of paradise-and the reality of hell. It is a land beautiful and harsh, enticing and deadly, rich in history and heartbreak. Across the border, the desert is the same but there are different secrets. In <i>Imperial</i>, award-winning writer William T. Vollmann takes us deep into the heart of this haunted region, and by extension into the dark soul of American imperialism.<P>Known for his penetrating meditations on poverty and violence, Vollmann has spent ten years doggedly investigating every facet of this bi-national locus, raiding archives, exploring polluted rivers, guarded factories, and Chinese tunnels, talking with everyone from farmers to border patrolmen in his search for the fading American dream and its Mexican equivalent. The result is a majestic book that addresses current debates on immigration, agribusiness, and corporate exploitation, issues that will define America's identity in the twenty-first century.</p> <h3> The Barnes & Noble Review </h3> <p> Imperial County, in the southeastern corner of California, seems at first glance like an improbable subject for a 1,125-page work of nonfiction. Imperial is known for its winter lettuce, its Sweet Imperial onions, and the Salton Sea, a polluted saline lake it shares with Riverside; otherwise, it's the kind of landscape where there's so little going on that the Navy uses a great swath of it as an air-to-ground gunnery range. Imperial has played the Kuwaiti desert (in <em>Jarhead</em>) and the desert planet Tatooine in <em>Star Wars. </em> Even the county's Chamber of Commerce can muster only a few facts about it: the county was established in 1907; its highest point is Blue Angel Peak (4,548 feet), its lowest the Salton Sea (a paradoxical 235 feet below sea level). How much, you have to wonder, can there be to say about Imperial? </p>

<p>The Imperial Valley of southeastern California and the U.S./Mexico border is a place with a heavy history and an uncertain future. It is a land of great progress and crushing failure, home to a past that includes migrant workers, Mexican laborers, struggling farmers, corporate exploitation, pollution, the forgotten paradise of the Salton Sea, and underground tunnels that housed illegal Chinese immigrants, brothels, and gambling dens. Even at the turn of the twentieth century, few settled in the Imperial Valley because of its hot desert climate and lack of water. In 1901, the Imperial Land Company recognized the area’s soil potential and diverted the waters of the Colorado River to it, in effect transforming wasteland into productive farmland.</p>
<p>Named for the corporation that brought it to life, the Imperial Valley, its surrounding regions (including the Coachella and Mexicali Valleys), and the people who live there are the subjects of the latest work by acclaimed author and now published photographer William T. Vollmann (who will release an epic nonfiction book about the area with Viking in 2009). “It’s an incredible area, teeming with secrets and the tension of the border,” says Vollmann of his first pictorial work. “It’s that tension that gives the place its meaning.” 
</p>
<p><i><b>Imperial</b></i> is a study of a people and place on the margins, familiar territory for its author. Through his exploration, Vollmann uncovers the people and their struggles, which have been so easily pushed aside. It’s a photographic portrait of the Valley’s last decade, in which Vollmann’s pictures provide a visual identity to those who call it home. They have suffered and flourished amidst a landscape that is both breathtaking and heartbreaking, alluring and repelling.
</p>

An epic study of an emblematic American region by one of our most celebrated writersIt sprawls across a stinking artificial sea, across the deserts, date groves, and labor camps of southeastern California, right across the Mexican border. For generations of migrant workers, from Okies fleeing the Dust Bowl of the 1930s to Mexican laborers today, Imperial County has held the promise of paradise-and the reality of hell. It is a land beautiful and harsh, enticing and deadly, rich in history and heartbreak. Across the border, the desert is the same but there are different secrets. In Imperial, award-winning writer William T. Vollmann takes us deep into the heart of this haunted region, and by extension into the dark soul of American imperialism. Known for his penetrating meditations on poverty and violence, Vollmann has spent ten years doggedly investigating every facet of this bi-national locus, raiding archives, exploring polluted rivers, guarded factories, and Chinese tunnels, talking with everyone from farmers to border patrolmen in his search for the fading American dream and its Mexican equivalent. The result is a majestic book that addresses current debates on immigration, agribusiness, and corporate exploitation, issues that will define America's identity in the twenty-first century.

From the author of Europe Central, winner of the National Book Award, a journalistic tour de force along the Mexican-American border – a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle AwardFor generations of migrant workers, Imperial Country has held the promise of paradise and the reality of hell. It sprawls across a stirring accidental sea, across the deserts, date groves and labor camps of Southeastern California, right across the border into Mexico. In this eye-opening book, William T. Vollmann takes us deep into the heart of this haunted region, exploring polluted rivers and guarded factories and talking with everyone from Mexican migrant workers to border patrolmen. Teeming with patterns, facts, stories, people and hope, this is an epic study of an emblematic region.

For generations of migrant workers, Imperial County--the California desert region where the U.S. borders Mexico--has held the promise of paradise and the reality of hell. Award-winning writer Vollmann takes readers deep into the heart of this haunted region.

2012-02-03