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

Description

Deep Water 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, Jacques Leslie makes this crisis vivid through the stories of three figures: Medha Patkar, the world's foremost anti-dam activist; Thayer Scudder, an American anthropologist; and Don Blackmore, an Australian water manager.Taking the reader to the sites of controversial dams - the Sardar Sarovar in India, the Kariba in Zambia, the Murray River weir system in Australia - Leslie shows why dams are at once the hope of developing nations and a blight on their people and landscape. Deep Water is the best book written on the emerging water crisis.

Jacques Leslie is the author of The Mark: A War Correspondent's Memoir of Vietnam and Cambodia. His writing has appeared in Harper's, The Atlantic Monthly, The New York Times Magazine, and The Washington Monthly. He lives in Mill Valley, California.

"Fascinating . . . Jacques Leslie is a fine writer. . . . No other book presents this issue to a lay reader so thoroughly and so persuasively." --The Seattle Times "Leslie delivers scene and mood with the economy and precision of a good novelist. His profiles are so well observed one forgets that the characters have not sprung from his own imagination." --Columbia Journalism Review "Leslie's edgy, potent, and in-depth inquiry unveils the drastic, unintentional consequences of dams and exposes yet more evidence of the catastrophic results of allowing greed and politics to trump science and justice." --Booklist "Leslie has written a volume that is heir, both in organization and in power, to Encounters with the Archdruid, John McPhee's classic profile of David Brower and his fight against dam-nation. . . . Superb." --Bill McKibben, OnEarth magazine "If the wars of this century were fought over oil, the wars of the next century will be fought over water." --Ismail Serageldin, former Vice President of the World Bank