A River Lost: Life and Death of the Columbia Book

Paperback. Pub Date: 1998 Pages: 272 in Publisher: WW Norton & Co. This is a book about how well-intentioned Americans dammed up the Columbia. Great River of the West. Fulfilling dreams of cheap electricity and gardens flourishing in. the desert. It is also a narrative of exploitation: of Native Americans. of endangered salmon. of nuclear waste. and of a river - once wild - tamed to puddled remains. Harden's story is a journey of rediscovery. His home town. Moses Lake . Washington. once bone dry. could not have existed without gargantuan irrigation schemes. His father. a Depression migrant trained as a welder. helped build dams - including Grand Coulee - and later worked at the secret Hanford plutonium plant. Now he and his neighbors . who had thought of themselves as patriots. stood accused of killing the river. As Blaine Harden traveled the thousand miles of the Columbia -...Read More