Apropos of our recent discussions on history and book recommendations and reading: Some months ago Tom Blackburn mentioned The Source: How Rivers Made America and America Remade its Rivers by Martin Doyle (pp. 349). It came to the top of my book group list and we met yesterday to discuss it. Amazingly there were no "grumps" as Tom B. predicted: the reviews and comments were positive, even enthusiastic.
The "genius" of the book is to combine history, sovereignty, taxation, and regulation in a tidy compass of three centuries tracing the earliest settlers efforts to crawl over the "fall line" of the Appalachians with their canoes, to schemes drawing water rights from the highland farms of the Colorado River to populous Southwestern cities, and more recently to undo some of the river "improvements" fabricated since the earliest days of the American colony. Along the way Doyle combines big ideas and homey conversations with the men (yes, men) managing dams, canals, tugs, earth movers, etc. And nowhere near 1,356 pages!
Thanks for a birthday gift idea for my dad. Since his birthday isn't until June, I've got ample time to read it first!
ReplyDeleteI don't know if any of you have read this book, This Blessed Earth. It was our book club selection a couple of months back. Its subject is farming. Our governor rather publicly declined to recognize it for the "One Book, One Nebraska" award, calling it "divisive and political" (I didn't find it so!). Which unintentionally boosted its sales to the point that Amazon ran out of copies.
ReplyDeleteBeth Black, a bookstore owner in Omaha, said in the WH article "...that even the regional distributor is out of copies and that the Norton sales rep asked if she could have Ricketts publicly refuse to read other Norton books."
Katherine, I should read this book just to get a feel for another group's problems. Walking in another's shoes in any depth does not come naturally. I've been fortunate to have a job that was often fun but it was never really dangerous or that physically taxing. I guess I could have been blinded by a stray laser pulse or killed by a high voltage supply but I always knew what I was doing. Certainly, my paycheck never depended on the vicissitudes of nature. Glad your governor's reverse magic worked.
DeleteNow that I am retired, I keep thinking of things I would like to learn more about--crows, geography, Icelandic, textiles. They want an old lady to work in the Friends of the Shiawassee River office, and I put my name in.
ReplyDeleteJean, I hope you get the job. I've been reading up on the Shiawassee. Apparently it has a long stretch without lawns and chemical runoff, leaking septic systems and other signs of what we are ignorantly pleased to call civilization.
DeleteI also found this on Michigan Water Trails: "The Shiawassee River offers a diverse range of paddling experiences for canoeists and kayakers of all abilities." Everything in nature offers a "diverse range," some better than others but all unspecifically blah-blah-blah unless someone describes them with enthusiasm. Hope you get the job.
Now I'm curious; I will have to read up on the Shiawassee.
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