Review - Cadillac Dessert: The American West and its Disappearing Water
by Marc Reisner
Written some 20 years ago, this book is a brilliantly researched and colorfully written account of how man's attempts to tame the deserts and arid plains have resulted in incredible folly, wasteful spending, and environmental destruction.
Blending history, geography, political science and rolling narrative, it's an excellent expose of how greed, self-interest, misplaced piety, and pork-barrel politics have resulted in hundreds of at best dubious, and at worst incredibly destructive, water projects over the last century.