A River Lost
The Life and Death of the Columbia
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5.0 • 1 Rating
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- $18.99
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- $18.99
Publisher Description
"Superbly reported and written with clarity, insight, and great skill." —Washington Post Book World
After two decades, Washington Post journalist Blaine Harden returned to his small-town birthplace in the Pacific Northwest to follow the rise and fall of the West’s most thoroughly conquered river. To explore the Columbia River and befriend those who collaborated in its destruction, he traveled on a monstrous freight barge sailing west from Idaho to the Grand Coulee Dam, the site of the river’s harnessing for the sake of jobs, electricity, and irrigation. A River Lost is a searing personal narrative of rediscovery joined with a narrative of exploitation: of Native Americans, of endangered salmon, of nuclear waste, and of a once-wild river. Updated throughout, this edition features a new foreword and afterword.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Although shorter than the Mississippi, the Columbia River, on the border between Washington and Oregon, is many times more powerful. Its energy comes from its steepness--it falls twice as far as the Mississippi in half the distance, and is what so attracted government engineers interested in producing hydroelectric power. Numerous dams, including Grand Coulee, "larger than any structure ever built in world history," transformed the river into a huge, navigable lake making Lewiston, Idaho, an unlikely seaport. "The river was killed more than sixty years ago and was reborn as plumbing." Washington Post journalist Harden goes back to his boyhood home (Moses Lake, Wash.) and examines the changes--sociological, environmental, economic and aesthetic--that the taming of this great river wrought. His wonderful account touches on the destruction of Native American cultures dependent on the river and its salmon, and on the near extinction of the salmon themselves. Also fairly portrayed are the people and industries currently dependent on both the managed river and massive government subsidies: the nuclear industry, commercial barge traffic and desert farmers irrigating with the river's water. Harden provides a sensitive and thoughtful examination of a complex situation.
Customer Reviews
A River Lost
I found this book to be a fascinating work, by Blaine Harden, and came upon it quite by accident after reading another book of his, called Escape from Camp 14. My son goes to university in Forest Grove, just outside of Portland, and I have driven over, along and beside the Colombia River, and never had the slightest inkling of all of the history, problems, politics and power that revolves around this life-giving river. Harden got down and dirty to write this book, talking and then documenting in perfect detail his chats with barge drivers, power plant employees, farmers, politicians, indigenous people, activists and anyone else who has a stake in this river that finds itself clogged up with no less than 16 dams along it. I do not usually read books twice, but this is one that I would, just for all of it's fascinating facts and stories that deal with this great river. The book poses as many questions as it provides answers, but its a highly recommended read, as far as I am concerned!