Deep Water: The Epic Struggle Over Dams, Displaced People, and the Environment
Jacques Leslie, . . Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $25 (352pp) ISBN 978-0-374-28172-4
This worthy but difficult book looks at large dams and their consequences through the eyes of three members of the 1990s' World Commission on Dams. Indian activist Medha Patkar planned to drown herself to protest the Sardar Sarovar dam's displacement of several hundred thousand people. Thayer Scudder, a dam resettlement expert and consultant to the World Bank, stopped a dam that would have destroyed Botswana's Okavango Delta. Don Blackmore, in Australia, where dams are a virtual necessity, has to regulate "the dozens of variables that affect the health of a river basin" during an acute drought. Leslie's (
Reviewed on: 06/13/2005
Genre: Nonfiction
Other - 368 pages - 978-0-374-70785-9
Paperback - 368 pages - 978-0-312-42556-2