I am sure this was interesting to some, but oh, I just couldn't finish it. Very dry, no pun intended. ( )

Another mandatory read for high school and college students for proper indoctrination. ( )

an importnat book for anybody who is interested in urban history and the history of the American West. Why reason why the West is gone is found in this book. It you are interested in your food sources, politics, and sociology this book is a must read. One of the most important books about modern American social problems you will ever read. Sadly even at twenty years of age it is still presicient and hardhitting of the truth. It is so sad that in twenty years nothing has changed - except the fact that there is less water than ever spread around to more people than ever in the American Southwest. ( )

The frightening thing about this book is that it was written 20 years ago! We will NEVER learn!!?? ( )

One of my favorite books; a compelling indictment of our water policy. I'm right wing, but this book really challenges our thinking about how private is our "private enterprise" in the West ( )

Cadillac Desert by Marc Reisner is a detailed account of dam construction and water projects in the American West, starting with the explorations of John Wesley Powell in the late 1860s up through to the situation in the early 1990s. It is really incredible that in the short span of time since the late 1800s, almost all of the settlement of the desert West has taken place, along with huge associated water projects. From end to end it reads as a chronicle of incredible folly. In the service of greed and a mania for monumental construction, almost unimaginably vast alterations have been made to the natural environment, with giant dams, water pumped over and through mountains, canals across deserts, good land flooded, bad land irrigated, it's an incredible catalog of man versus nature.

I can't even begin to summarize the scope of a 500-page, indepth work like this in a few paragraphs. I can say that if you have an interest in environmental issues or history you should find this interesting. I could sometimes only manage a chapter at a time as the monumental avarice, deceit, and indifference to the environment that was described, with billions of dollars in government money used to subsidize, amongst other things, poor crops growing in a desert to the benefit of giant corporations, well let's just say if my blood could boil steam would have been coming out of my ears. ( )

The winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award, this is a history of the struggle to discover and control water in the American West. It is the tale of rivers diverted and damned, political corruption and intrigue, billion-dollar battles over water rights, and economic and ecological disaster. ( )

This well documented, highly readable account of Western water development will give you a belly ache from both disgust and laughter, but you can't be the same after reading it. Should be required reading in high school. Reisner hedges a bit in the new forward to the latest edition. ( )