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Water Wars: Drought, Flood, Folly, and the Politics of Thirst

Water Wars: Drought, Flood, Folly, and the Politics of Thirst

Updated with new material

Every day, we hear alarming news about droughts, pollution, population growth, and climate change—which threaten to make water, even more than oil, the cause of war within our lifetime. Diane Raines Ward reaches beyond the headlines to illuminate our most vexing problems and tells the stories of those working to solve them: hydrologists, politicians, engineers, and everyday people. Based on ten years of research spanning five continents, Water Wars offers fresh insight into a subject to which our fate is inextricably bound.

List Price: $ 16.00

Price: $ 5.84

Customer Reviews

16 of 18 people found the following review helpful 5.0 out of 5 stars
WATER WARS, November 28, 2004 By  Sharon N. Denmark (Virginia) – See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)
The author, Diane Raines Ward, is obviously passionate about this subject–she has traveled the world and seen with her own eyes the good and the bad of water ‘management.’ She does not make assumptions, she does not make sweeping generalizations–she examines each dam, river, levee and irrigation system individually, thereby proving how complicated the water wars are. Her passion for the subject also makes the book quite readable; it is written more like a novel than a scientific treatise. My only complaint is the complete lack of maps and diagrams, but that does not stop me from giving the book 5 stars.
 
13 of 17 people found the following review helpful 3.0 out of 5 stars
An easy read, but has flaws, January 8, 2003 By  Howdy Pierce (Boulder, CO USA) – See all my reviews
Ward takes a comprehensive and world-wide view of the problem of managing water, and I learned a considerable amount from her book. She writes with an easy style. (Another reviewer calls it "the best book on water that I’ve read"; that’s true for me, too, but in my case it’s faint praise since I’ve only read this book!) Clearly, water management is becoming more important as the world’s population grows, and given the public policy decisions facing most nations, it is a subject that the average citizen will need to learn more about. Unfortunately, the book has a couple of flaws. First, it is shallow technically, even for a popular non-fiction book; Ward could benefit by providing additional depth on both the technology of watershed management and the dominant legal structures behind it. Second, I found the footnotes to be very poorly written; frequently direct quotes appear without footnotes, and on many occasions the information in a footnote is almost a non-sequitur when compared to the footnoted text.
 

8 of 11 people found the following review helpful 5.0 out of 5 stars
The best book on water I’ve read, September 26, 2002 By A Customer

This is a terrific book-passionate, informed, wide-ranging, and filled with lots of quotes and anecdotes. And it’s very personal-Ms. Ward isn’t writing from an armchair-she’s been to all the places she writes about, and it shows. She’s got a great sense of drama and eye for detail-you’re right there with her in the helicopter when she flies low over a network of rivers. And because she knows the subject so well, Ms. Ward places all the twists and turns in her fascinating story in a broad, historical context. I’ll never look at a glass of water in quite the same way again.

 
Last modified on Thursday, 22 September 2016 16:58

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