Table of Contents

Introduction: A Semidesert with a Desert Heart
Chapter One: A Country of Illusion
Chapter Two: The Red Queen
Chapter Three: First Causes
Chapter Four: An American Nile (I)
Chapter Five: The Go-Go Years
Chapter Six: Rivals in Crime
Chapter Seven: Dominy
Chapter Eight: An American Nile (II)
Chapter Nine: The Peanut Farmer and the Pork Barrel
Chapter Ten: Chinatown
Chapter Eleven: Those Who Refuse to Learn...
Chapter Twelve: Things Fall Apart
Epilogue: A Civilization, If You Can Keep It
Afterword to the Revised Edition
Acknowledgments
Notes and Bibliography
Index

About the Author

Marc Reisner worked for many years at the Natural Resources Defense Council. In 1979, he received an Alicia J. Patterson Journalism Fellowship and began the research for Cadillac Desert. He was also the author of Game Wars: The Undercover Pursuit of Wildlife Poachers and A Dangerous Place: California's Unsettling Fate. Resisner died in 2000.

Lawrie Mott, formerly an environmental heath scientist with the Natural Resources Defense Council, lives in a Bay Area county that receives all its water from local supplies. From Marc Reisner, her late husband, she learned about water in the West at their dinner table and during long drives through western states. Mott received her B.A. from the University of California at Santa Cruz and her M.S. from Yale.

Reviews

"Masterful. . .Among the most influential environmental books published by an American since Silent Spring."
--San Francisco Examiner 

"Essential background reading for anyone who cares about the drought ravaging the West and the region's prospects for changing course before it is too late."
--Mark Hertsgaard, The Daily Beast

"Timely and of national interest. . . . Resiner captures Western water history in Cinemascope and Technicolor. . . . lawmakers, taxpayers, hurry up and read this book."
--The Washington Post  

"The scale of this book is as staggering as that of Hoover Dam. Beautifully written and meticulously researched, it spans our century-long effort to moisten the arid West. . . . Anyone thinking of moving west of the hundredth meridian should read this book before they call their real estate agent."
--St. Louis Post-Dispatch 

"A revealing, absorbing, often amusing and alarming report on where billions of [taxpayers'] dollars have gone-- and where a lot more are going . . . [Reisner] has put the story together in trenchant form."
--The New York Times Book Review