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Binding: PaperbackDewey Decimal Number: 333.9100978 EAN: 9780140178241 Edition: Revised ISBN: 0140178244 Label: Penguin (Non-Classics) Manufacturer: Penguin (Non-Classics) Number Of Items: 1 Number Of Pages: 608 Publication Date: January 01, 1993 Publisher: Penguin (Non-Classics) Studio: Penguin (Non-Classics) Editorial Review: Amazon.com: The definitive history of water resources in the American West, and a very illuminating lesson in the political economy of limited resources anywhere. Highly recommended! Book Description: Part One Of Two Parts The story of the American West is the story of the relentless quest to control and allocate nature's most common, and the West's most precious, resource: water. CADILLAC DESERT recounts this dramatic saga. The early settlers were lured by free land. But there was not enough water to sustain them, and they drifted on. Only the Mormons stayed, carefully tending a system of irrigation canals that tempered perpetual drought. Their success gave birth to federal aid programs, principally the Bureau of Reclamation. Without the bureau, without Hoover, Shasta and Grand Coulee, the West as we know it would not exist. Average Rating:
 Rating:  - OutstandingThis was an outstanding book. Filled with a lot of information I had only partially known, and seldom understood. The story of thousands of dams built for no reason other then to keep two Federal agencies in business. Some success and some death causing failures. A must read for anyone west of the Mississippi with a interest in the historical infrastructure of the western states despite the massive mishandling of Federal funds to aid in ecological disaster. A true study in government math at alludes ... Read More Rating: - Ahead of its timeThis was a return engagement to "Cadillac Desert", as I had read the original in the 1980s, amazed at the time, considering it a premier example of thorough history and analysis in a subject about which few people knew much at all. What could have been a "dry" subject was actually quite gripping and informative, and fortunate to have many participants in key moments still available. In that sense the author was ahead of his time, documenting essential history that looks all the more important ... Read More Rating: - Highly RecommendedEssential reading for anyone living in the American West or living in the East and subsidizing water rates in the West. Rating:  - this is what i'd been missing?Cadillac Desert is a plodding book that spends more time making sideways remarks about its characters than establishing it's own narrative. Plagued by numerous typographical errors, it reads in fits and starts. While its message of government excess and because-we-can justification for modifying the natural landscape is surely worthwhile, if repetitive, the fact of the matter is that two generations of farmers, ranchers and urbanites in the American West looked to the Bureau of Reclamation as the only organization ... Read More Rating:  - America's Growing DesertsThis book was an alarming, eye-opening account of how the United States is running out of it's own water resources that provide for many of desert urban areas. Why is it that we are settling in areas that are not natural for us as human beings to live in, and depleting our water resources and damaging natural beauty in order to live in seemingly uninhabital areas, such as Las Vegas, and Phoenix? This book looks to address this and much much more. A great read for anyone interested in enviromental politics and issues ... Read More |
