A River No More: The Colorado River and the West, Expanded and Updated edition [Paperback]

Philip L. Fradkin (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: September 30, 1996 | ISBN-10: 0520205642 | ISBN-13: 978-0520205642 | Edition: 2nd

Here is the definitive history of the development of the Colorado River and the claims made on its waters, from its source in the Wyoming Rockies to the California and Arizona borders where, so saline it kills plants, it peters out just short of the Gulf of California. Ever increasing demands on the river to supply cities in the desert render this new edition all too timely. Philip Fradkin has updated this valuable book with a new preface.

Editorial Reviews

Review

"A River No More makes a statement of the utmost importance and gravity. Though it focuses on the Colorado River and its tributaries, the book's implications reach from the high plains of Montana, Wyoming, Colorado, and New Mexico to the Pacific littoral; from federal land and water policies to the survival strategies of the ranches, farms, country towns, and small regional capitals that constitute the west's only permanent and renewable way of life." -- Wallace Stegner, The New Republic

"The most comprehensive book we have had or are ever likely to have on the Colorado Rivera portrait with a message." -- T. H. Watkins, San Francisco Chronicle Review

About the Author

Philip L. Fradkin is an environmental historian, the author of six acclaimed books on the American West, most recently The Seven States of California (1995). His book Fallout was nominated for both a Pultizer and a Bancroft Prize.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 372 pages
• Publisher: University of California Press; 2nd edition (September 30, 1996)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0520205642
• ISBN-13: 978-0520205642
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 6.1 x 1.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #941,121 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Discover books, learn about writers, read author blogs, and more.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

11 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Holy crap, what a depressing book., September 29, 2005

By 

Mike Smith (Albuquerque, NM) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)   

This review is from: A River No More: The Colorado River and the West, Expanded and Updated edition (Paperback)

This book is a real downer.

Even the cover is.

Even the title! The Colorado River's not a river anymore? It's true. Can you turn a river on and off? Can you control how fast a river flows? (That sounds more like...a DITCH!)

The Colorado is the most regulated river in America. Over forty dams control its water, and with a word from the right people, its flow can be stopped just like that.

The river starts in the mountains north of Grand Junction, Colorado, gets drained right away into various canals, and what's left runs from there into a couple of small reservoirs and into Utah. It runs past the over two thousand natural arches of Arches National Park, and on to Moab.

The river rushes past the mouth of the Green River, heads on through Canyonlands National Park, and eventually, stops in Lake Powell. It goes on, though. Alive, but less alive: hidden underneath Lake Powell, then through the dam, then coursing blue and green and silt-free, like it never was, down past Lees Ferry and through the Grand Canyon, with never a flood to wash out the tamarisk, and temperatures too cold for any native fish to live in. So cold and so different that four of the Grand Canyon's eight native species of fish are now extinct. Gone forever.

Then the river's under Lake Mead, and then it's squeezing through another dam. After that it's trying to keep Nevada and California from Arizona, and it's going through three more reservoirs, and even more dams. Dam. Dam. Dam.

What'd the fish say when it hit a wall?

Dam.

Then, it's the Rio Colorado: same thing, but in Spanish, and less of it. It runs the Baja-Sonora state line in Mexico, trickles through some dying wetlands, and sometimes, in rare flood years, makes it to the Gulf of California. The ocean.

...But it almost never makes it that far anymore.

The river is now very, very useful to people...but is it still a river? And is what we've done right?

This book is a good examination of that question, of the river's sad tributaries, and of the state of the river itself. It's very factual, open in its biases, only occasionally slow and meandering, and it is dense with valuable (though sometimes out-of-date) information.

Read this and learn. Read this and be enlightened. Read this and be depressed and angered out of your skull...but read it.