Deep Water: The Epic Struggle Over Dams, Displaced People, and the Environment

A Discover Magazine Top Science Book of the Year

A Northern California Book Award Finalist

There are more than 45,000 of them in the world. They have altered the speed of the planet's rotation, the tilt of its axis, and the shape of its gravitational field. They influence landscapes and societies. They are dams, and in Deep Water, Jacques Leslie offers an incisive, searching, and beautifully written account of the emerging crisis over dams and the world's water. Reporting in the tradition of John McPhee and Peter Matthiessen, Leslie examines the crisis through the lives of three people: Medha Patkar, the world's foremost anti-dam activist; Thayer Scudder, an American anthropologist; and Don Blackmore, an Australian water manager. In each of these engrossing portraits, Leslie shows how dams seduce national leaders with seeming bounties of water and power but end up producing blights on the citizenry and landscape. Deep Water is an eloquent and important book about the water crisis and a startling look at the fate of our planet.

Author: Jacques Leslie
Publisher: Picador USA
Published: 11/14/2006
Pages: 368
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 1.02lbs
Size: 8.54h x 5.52w x 0.88d
ISBN: 9780312425562

About the Author

Jacques Leslie's writing has won numerous awards, including the J. Anthony Lukas Work-in-Progress Award for Deep Water and the Sigma Delta Chi Foreign Correspondence Award for his reporting during the Vietnam War. He is the author of The Mark: A War Correspondent's Memoir of Vietnam and Cambodia. He lives in Mill Valley, California.

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