This is a meticulously researched, richly detailed, and carefully footnoted study of the successful activities of Ralph Bramel Lloyd (1875–1953) and his Lloyd Corporation in the first half of the twentieth century. Lloyd started his fortune as an independent oilman and, using his profits, quickly diversified into buying and developing commercial real estate, mainly in and around Los Angeles and Ventura, California, and Portland, Oregon. The book considers the two activities in their interrelationship as well as apart.

As author Michael Adamson notes, luck often helped explain Lloyd's success. His father owned an unsuccessful ranch in Ventura, sixty miles north of Los Angeles. Oil drilling had begun there in the 1880s, but only after World War I was the full potential of the vast Ventura oil fields realized, and Ventura became an oil boomtown. Lloyd's involvement in the oil industry blossomed in the 1920s. With capital from the sale of the ranch, Lloyd became an independent oilman, leasing and buying property to drill for oil and, when successful, usually selling out to the big guys—who in his case were primarily the Associated Oil Co. and the Shell Oil Company of California.

The oil industry was, of course, for the most part vertically integrated. This part of the industry's history is well known. Relatively unexplored, however, is the important role of the thousands of independent oilmen and their small business drilling companies, especially in California and Texas, in shaping the upstream aspect of the industry. Owned by one or at most a handful of men, they took chances and acted quickly and with a flexibility that the bigger corporations often could not match. We do have an account of independent drillers in Upton Sinclair's 1927 muckraking novel, Oil!—based on the ruthless activities of Edward Doheny—that was the basis of the 2007 film There Will Be Blood. Academically, we now have this important work in addition to earlier studies by Ralph Andreano, Paul Sabin, and Carl Abbott.

Lloyd “found irresistible the potential returns from investing his mounting surplus of capital from petroleum extraction in commercial real estate” (p. 76). He enjoyed considerable experience in land transactions when he very actively involved himself in the Lloyd Corporation's acquiring and developing of commercial real property on a grand scale. In describing Lloyd's hands-on activities, Adamson composes a broad picture that presents a very full account of the oil industry's strong impact on the development of the West, its cities, and their politics and culture.

The history of real estate is about speculative construction, and the coastal oil boom provided a feverish setting, but one where competing interests sought to determine the pace, direction, and nature of development. Politically astute and backed by oil money, Lloyd met with frequent success in getting local politicians, businesses, and governments to back the interests of the oil companies over competing claims. He was no less adept as a property developer in achieving what he needed and wanted from government, in terms of public infrastructure, building codes, and property taxes. In 1926, Lloyd extended his operations to Portland, acquiring a large portion of the city's east side—nearly eight hundred unimproved lots. Ventura and Los Angeles receded in relative importance.

The most important factors that Lloyd could not control were the state of the local and national economies and their ups and downs, and these critically effected the pace and scale of development, return on investment, and market value. Profits from his oil business, however, allowed him to weather the Depression years without losing property, but his development of the property was greatly slowed. Indeed, several of his important projects for Portland were realized only several years after his death.

The author devotes much of this study to a highly detailed depiction and analysis of Lloyd's modus operandi in his involvement in Portland's growth as a major metropolis: “To be sure, Lloyd equated his interests with the public good” (p. 93). The city's economic growth was his top priority, but he always retained a serious concern with doing right for the community. In all his developmental efforts he strove for quality and long-term involvement rather than turning a quick profit on a shoddy product.

Lloyd was always eager to take advantage of any governmental program in the New Deal that benefited his oil and real estate interests. Renting to federal and other governmental agencies during the Depression years and World War II helped keep his properties afloat until the private sector recovered in the late 1940s. Nevertheless, along with many other businessmen he viewed the Roosevelt administration's policies after 1936 as impeding economic recovery, and he was particularly incensed by federal tax policies related to rental income.

My only criticism of this study is that in discussing Lloyd's many operations in oil and real estate, its frequent movement backward and forward in time makes for hard reading. But it is reading that is well worth doing. Adamson has made a useful contribution both to the histories of the cities under consideration and to the role of small business in the oil industry in the first half of the twentieth century.