As a member of the Connecticut River Joint Commission, journalist Tripp, author of the Vietnam memoir Father, Soldier, Son
, juggles a multitude of conflicting tasks—helping oversee a disappointing salmon restoration program, monitoring pollution, negotiating with the hydroelectric dam utility that pegs river flows to the electricity spot-market, and pondering a killing spree by an antiregulatory fanatic. His is a valuable insider's perspective on the challenges of practical environmentalism, but it's one partly obscured by the jumbled structure of this meditation on the river and its discontents. Evocative nature scenes are interspersed with bureaucratic wrangles with industry, canoe trips with then Vermont governor Howard Dean (who wrote the book's foreword), ruminations on environmental apocalypse and condemnations of the industry-fomented, antienvironmentalist "property rights" movement. Many patches are stylish and illuminating, but the crazy-quilt organization impedes the development of Tripp's important defense of unfettered government regulatory power in the management of environmental issues. (May)
