Volume 48, Number 6 · April 12, 2001
Grand Canyon Sweet
By Larry McMurtry
A River Running West: The Life of John Wesley Powell
Donald Worster
Oxford University Press, 673 pp., $35.00
Donald Worster has devoted most of an impressive career to writing about American water—or the lack of it. His book Dust Bowl (1979) is still the best study of that catastrophe; his Rivers of Empire (1985) offers a somber but solid assessment of what water management—or, rather, mismanagement—has done to the West. He concludes, correctly, that the Colorado River has essentially died as a part of nature, to be reborn as money. The Colorado may be the most exploited river in the West, but it is not the only one. Much of the fabled Missouri, river of Lewis and Clark, has been impounded too.
Review, 2576 words
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