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Summary: The Rushing Tide of American Water History
Review: The book chronicles American water history (focusing on the West) from the mid-19th Century to present times. It starts with the first bewildered settlers and explorers in the 1800's, all from Europe or the NE U.S., where it rains regularly, and there are no deserts or droughts. The west was a foreign country to them. Already inveighed with creating a new home and a new life, these folks had to create new ways to gather, store and use water. This book details that continuing saga. Early on, dams became paramount concerns, and the west is full of them. Cadillac Desert describes how they are built, the political machinations, the ridiculous cost-benefit of many of them. Overarching all this is an almost religious belief in humankind's right to bring water to barren areas, no matter what the long-term costs will be. Great book. Very engaging writing. Well researched. You'll learn about geography, geology, political science, natural resources, history, climatology, and most of all, about hubris and humility.
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Summary: You'll never see water in the same way again!
Review: This book begins with the author flying over my home town of Provo, Utah and wondering how in the hell are there can be so many people in a land that is primarily desert. It's a question (as a native of Arizona and Utah) that I have often asked myself. This book is for anyone who has ever turned on the hose to water their lawn and wondered "where did this come from?" Not only does this book answer that very important question, but also it does so in an interesting, humorous and provocative way. The story of securing water in the west is a story of intrigue, corruption, political infighting, greed and pork barrel politics. The chapter on how LA got their water (fictionalized in the film 'Chinatown') is worth the price of the book alone. Though the author states in the revised and updated version of this book that his original thesis may have been a tad alarmist, I think this book is as prescient and important as it was when it was first published in 1986. Well researched and written with incredible flair, this book is a must for anyone interested in western studies, water politics, the environment, social studies, or just anyone who has ever drank a glass of water (I guess that includes everybody). This is one of the best non-fiction books I have ever read because it changed my way of thinking- I have never been able to look a body of water in a passive disinterested way since. I imagine that's about the best compliment you can give a book- that it changes the way you see your world.
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Summary: A must read!
Review: If you live in, or care about, the West, or California, or anywhere with water nearby, you need to read this book. If you eat produce (oranges, rice, almonds, etc.) that is grown with water from irrigation projects, or you live somewhere where hydropower brings you electricity, you need to read this book. If you're interested in environmental issues, you need to read this book. Reisner writes with a thoroughness that is destined to make this the definitive work on the Western water wars - for now. His style of writing is engaging, at least for the topics that interest you. The rest can be skipped without losing anything. He paints a history that is more social and political than "environmental" in nature. And perhaps the value is that he's painting a *history* - this is how we got where we are to day. What you, the reader, do with this knowledge is up to you. He's not trying to preach. This book is loaded with facts, is meticulously researched, and yet is not burdensome. Get it!
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Summary: A Civilization, if You Can Keep it
Review: I write this partially in tribute to Marc Reisner, who passed away two weeks ago. There is very little else I can add to what has already been written about one of the most important books ever written about the American West. I would only add that Chapter 1, "Country of Illusion" should be required reading of every high school student in the country. It is the finest 37-page recount of the white man's settlement of the American West that I have ever read.
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Summary: Thank You
Review: I saw the PBS series before I read the book. I had low expectations for the documentary. After all, why on earth would a New Jersey boy care about water in the west? In the first 15 seconds, I was captivated. I bought the book soon after and read it slowly over the course of about a year. I was every bit as mesmerized as I was by the documentary. I admit my enjoyment of the book may have been slightly enhanced by reading it during an extended train trip and having the odd experience of repeatedly reading about places and looking up to see that we were passing through them. Then as I flew home, looking down to see we were flying over what I was reading about, as I read it. For the better part of a century, water was such an important part of our economy, government and lifestyle, nobody thought to think about what was happening. This book is a lucid and engrossing exploration of how such a seemingly innocent thing such as water can become something so powerful and political. More people should read the book. If you know nothing about the national hydrological history, or are intimately familiar with it, this book would be a good read. It covers history, the environment, politics and corruption, engineering, and some truly amazing people. I am truly saddened to hear of Marc Reisner's passing, he has had a large impact on the nation and how we view water, myself included.
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Summary: Water, water everywhere. Except in deserts.
Review: This outstanding history of a century of water projects is a lot to get your arms around -- 50,000 major dams provide a vulgar extravagance of water for desert metros like Los Angeles, Las Vegas, Phoenix, Denver, El Paso, Tucson ... Trillions of dollars spent. A perpetual stream of the boldest lying imaginable (for the times), graft, theft, piracy, and political corruption was behind many of the projects. Regarding the water projects built over the last 150 years, Reisner wonders, "What has it all amounted to? ... Not all that much ... Modern Utah, where large-scale irrigation has been going on longer than anywhere else, has 3 percent of its land area under cultivation. California has 1,200 major dams, the two biggest irrigation projects on earth ... but its irrigated acreage is not much larger than Vermont. Owens Lake in California dated back to the Ice Age. In 1905 it was about 35 feet deep and covered over 100 square miles. It was plied by steamboats. An Eden sparkled along the Owens Valley while snow sparkled nearby on Mt. Whitney, the highest peak between Canada and Mexico. It was so productive agriculturally that there was talk of building a railroad to carry the produce to Los Angeles. But Los Angeles wanted the Owens Valley's water. And L.A., although 250 miles away, was 4,000 feet downhill. With a population in 1907 of 500,000, the city had enormous political power and a cell of brutally cunning politicians - they inspired the U.S. Forest Service to designate much of the treeless Owens Valley a National Forest to seal the valley's doom. In 1913 the Los Angeles Aqueduct was completed and the Owens River started flowing on to Los Angeles. Coincidentally, L.A. would need only a fraction of the water for years, so it was used for - guess what? -- irrigating desert land in the San Fernando Valley that had been bought up by a syndicate. The syndicate's clairvoyant members were the arch capitalists of Los Angeles: the two owners of the L.A. Times and other molders of public acquiescence, the chairman of the Union Pacific Railroad, bank presidents, power company executives ... Five years later 75,000 acres of San Fernando Valley desert were under irrigation with water paid for by the taxpayers, almost as much land as was dropping OUT of production in the Owens Valley. Land values increased a hundred fold. From 1913 until 1990, Los Angeleans were supposed to just use water, not think about it, certainly not to worry about where it came from to transform their glaring desert into a Babylonian garden with its thirsty lawns, hedges and palm trees, with thousands of decorative fountains and waterfalls, swimming pools, even cooling mists sprayed into the air where people congregated. It wasn't until 77 years after the rape of Owens Valley that L.A. first began promoting water conservation. Thirteen years after the Los Angeles Aqueduct began flowing, Owens Lake was dry. The people of the Owens Valley did not go peacefully into oblivion. They occupied the aqueduct's flood gates and turned the water into the desert. Eventually they were driven off, then a series of explosions destroyed seventeen sections of the aqueduct. Finally, an army of Los Angeles police put an end to the resistance. The rape of Owens Valley started a feverish race between the competing U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and the Bureau of Reclamation to throw dams across every waterway in the country. Major rivers were dammed time and time again. Not one good unused dam site remains in the U.S. Projects like Hoover Dam were extremely beneficial. Without its output of electricity, West Coast industries might not have produced the aluminum and the thousands of planes it took to win WW II. Lake Mead has made an oasis out of Las Vegas. A network of canals laid in the Mojave Desert offers waterfront homesites! Many of the projects, however, were based on arithmetic that would have earned a schoolboy failing grades. The dams were big and bigger. "Hoover was big; Shasta was half again as big; Grand Coulee was bigger than both together ... The largest and longest concrete dam in the world ... so massive it would have ordinarily taken hundreds of years to cool down [as the concrete cured] and cooling pipe had to be laid through it at close intervals ... The pipe would have connected Seattle to Chicago." The story of Teton Dam (a Bureau dam) is a tragedy. Geologists recoiled at the idea of a dam at the fissured, earthquake-prone site. A Geological Survey geologist was so certain of the failure of any dam built there that he ended a memorandum with these prophetic words: "Since a flood could be anticipated, we might consider a series of strategically-placed motion-picture cameras to document the process." June 5, 1976: The reservoir behind brand-new Teton Dam is almost full. A seepage in the canyon wall began two days before and now the dam itself is vomiting mud. A spring appears at yet another seep, becomes a torrent and a whirlpool forms inside the dam. The dam disintegrates and 80 billion gallons of pent-up water is released -- the second largest flood in North America since the last Ice Age. The torrent continued all day until the huge reservoir was empty. The dam cost $100 million. Damage downstream: about $2 billion. PBS produced a commendable video of this important book. The four-tape special, available on Amazon's video site and at many libraries, is well worth watching. In it, the author of this book speaks at length, impressively. Chinatown, the movie with stellar performances by Jack Nicholson and Faye Dunaway, is based to some extent on events described in Cadillac Desert.
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Summary: Outstanding!
Review: I confess to being fond of the rather hyperbolic aphorism that one cannot understand America without understanding baseball. Bucolic (nine players occupying a couple acres of real estate), polite (the visitors are first up to the plate), and languid as a July evening, baseball in some important ways encapsulates several quintessentially American values. In a similar vein, one cannot understand America without understanding our expansion westward from the original eastern-seaboard colonies. That migration also encapsulated some traditional American values, like hubris, greed, and profound stupidity. And, to understand one of the most important factors that allowed the West to be peopled, Marc Reisner's _Cadillac Desert_ is indispensible. Reisner's account of the 'development' of water supplies in the West reads sort of like a cross between a good doctoral dissertation and the National Inquirer. Fellow environmentalists will appreciate the genuine scholarship that has gone into this book, while die-hard Western water developers will likely howl at his oversimplifications, glib generalities, and occasional fixation on the scurrilous. Given those genuine flaws, however, this is a book that needs to be widely read, even now some fifteen years after it was first written. Reisner pulls no punches as he unveils how water "flows uphill towards money", resulting in, among other evils: taxpayer subsidies of wealthy corporate-farm irrigation whose produce could be sold so cheaply as to undercut and drive out of business the small farmers the subsidies were supposed to help; millenia-old aquifers 'mined' almost to depletion for the purpose of growing cash crops where, by nature, they should never grow in the first place; the wholesale destruction of the habitat of salmon, waterfowl, and prarie grasses, not to mention Native American villages; the leaching into the soil of the accumulated salts, pesticides, and fertilizers of all the farms on a 'managed' river's course, despoiling (permanently, in some cases) the land downriver. John McPhee's book, _The Forces of Nature_, chronicles some of mankind's most heroically idiotic attempts to outduel nature to serve our own ends, like carving huge catchment basins into the sides of the mountains around Los Angeles to protect the million-dollar mansions built there from the occasional mudslide. The trouble, of course, is that the houses should not have been built in harm's way in the first place, so the 'solution' is expensive, ineffective, and almost silly since it should have never been needed. Now magnify that theme to the western third of the nation and you have a taste of _Cadillac Desert_. It is a rollicking good read that makes our attempts to control water in the West into a century-long tragicomedy. Highly recommended.
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Summary: Required Reading
Review: Cadillac Desert should be required reading for every American. On the surface it tells the story of water development and conservation (or lack thereof) in the American west in particular and the nation in general. Throughout the book however, you are given an understanding of how our government actually works. I always wondered why a company in California will contribute heavily to a congressman from New York. Now I know. I also know why our government will spend so much tax money on seemingly wastful projects. Anyone interested in engineering will be fascinated by the construction of the huge dams. Marc Reisner also relates some of the disasters that resulted from poorly constucted or situated dams. This book is well researched and well written and for a book with so much technical information, quite easy and enjoyable to read. Anyone interested in water conservation, irrigation, American government, American history, engineering feats or development of the American west will love this book
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Summary: It changed my views
Review: I work in a small consulting engineering office that deals almost too much in water related issues. I thought that we had a good understanding of "water management." Hardly! Myself and four others in the office have read this book (all at my urging) and we all consider it to be perhaps the best non-fiction book we have ever read. At times the details may become a little confusing, but the historical content is absolutely fascinating. I sent it to a friend of mine in Pheonix, who after reading the book ripped out all of the irrigation piping in his yard. Trust me, you will too!
Rating: 
Summary: Long on Facts And Words
Review: The book is a great education of water development. The stories of human mismanagement, corruption and arrogance are stunning. However, better writing and less minute detail, especially in the middle of the book, would have helped its readability.
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