I can’t imagine a time in recent memory when Frances Dinkelspiel’s forthcoming book, Towers of Gold: How One Jewish Immigrant Named Isaias Hellman Created California, has been more relevant. I’ll post more about this book next month, but for the moment, read what Dinkelspiel had to say about it in a newsletter today:

For the past eight years I have been working on a biography of my great great grandfather, Isaias Hellman, one of the most influential financiers of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Hellman started the first successful bank in Los Angeles, went on to head Wells Fargo and numerous other banks, served as a regent of the University of California and helped start the University of Southern California. He also played a pivotal role in the development of the transportation, oil, wine, and water industries in California.

My book, Towers of Gold: How One Jewish Immigrant Named Isaias Hellman Created California, will be published by St. Martins Press on November 11.

San Francisco Magazine praises Towers of Gold for its “elegantly restrained prose.”

William Deverell, the director of the Huntington-USC Institute of California and the West says, “Towers of Gold is a thorough and compelling portrait of a hugely influential man whose role in the rise of California can hardly be overestimated.”

And Julia Flynn Siler, author of the bestselling House of Mondavi, says, “Attempted stagecoach robberies, an assassination attempt, bank runs, the 1906 earthquake-it’s all here in Frances Dinkelspiel’s meticulously researched and masterly crafted biography.”

This note is just to let you know about Towers of Gold and encourage you to look for it when it hits bookstores next month. I also will be speaking at a number of events in San Francisco, Los Angeles, and New York in the coming months and I hope you will come join me to learn more about the life of this remarkable Gilded Age financier.