Careful account of environmental controversy, a companion to Robert W. Righter’s recent Battle Over Hetch Hetchy.
A tale of two valleys—and two quite different visions of what to do with them.
The Yosemite Valley, in the Sierra Nevada of California, “once had a sister—the Hetch Hetchy Valley—just twenty-five miles to the north,” writes Simpson (Landscape Architecture/Ohio State Univ.; Visions of Paradise, 1999). The past tense is important to note, for in the 1920s, following half a century of argument and exploration, the Tuolumne River in Hetch Hetchy was dammed to provide water and power for San Francisco, 170 miles distant. The two major camps were personified by conservationist John Muir and landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted on one hand and forestry expert Gifford Pinchot on the other; Muir and Olmsted pressed for protection of the entire Tuolumne watershed, whereas Pinchot held that the damage caused “by substituting a lake for the present swampy floor of the [Hetch Hetchy] valley . . . is altogether unimportant compared with the benefits to be derived from its use as a reservoir.” The political ascendancy of the railroading, ranching and development interests helped seal Hetch Hetchy’s fate, as did Pinchot’s own rise to head the U.S. Forest Service. The debate, Simpson observes, helped solidify stereotypes that persist today, including the characterization of conservationism as the brainchild of “the liberal, intellectual, and wealthy elite of the East Coast”; it also taught the conservationists to avoid grappling with local interests by taking environmental questions to a national audience, which would later serve Muir’s Sierra Club very well. Simpson does a good job of charting the complex political maneuvering that accompanied both the creation of Yosemite National Park and the damming of the Hetch Hetchy Valley, a matter that eventually came before the national legislature. He closes by endorsing a plan to remove the dam and restore the valley to its former state, asking, pointedly, “Would Congress listen to public opinion this time, or would economic interests and politics again dictate the outcome?”
Careful account of environmental controversy, a companion to Robert W. Righter’s recent Battle Over Hetch Hetchy.Pub Date: July 12, 2005
ISBN: 0-375-42231-5
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Pantheon
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2005
BOOK REVIEW
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.
“The Mongols swept across the globe as conquerors,” writes the appreciative pop anthropologist-historian Weatherford (The History of Money, 1997, etc.), “but also as civilization’s unrivaled cultural carriers.”
No business-secrets fluffery here, though Weatherford does credit Genghis Khan and company for seeking “not merely to conquer the world but to impose a global order based on free trade, a single international law, and a universal alphabet with which to write all the languages of the world.” Not that the world was necessarily appreciative: the Mongols were renowned for, well, intemperance in war and peace, even if Weatherford does go rather lightly on the atrocities-and-butchery front. Instead, he accentuates the positive changes the Mongols, led by a visionary Genghis Khan, brought to the vast territories they conquered, if ever so briefly: the use of carpets, noodles, tea, playing cards, lemons, carrots, fabrics, and even a few words, including the cheer hurray. (Oh, yes, and flame throwers, too.) Why, then, has history remembered Genghis and his comrades so ungenerously? Whereas Geoffrey Chaucer considered him “so excellent a lord in all things,” Genghis is a byword for all that is savage and terrible; the word “Mongol” figures, thanks to the pseudoscientific racism of the 19th century, as the root of “mongoloid,” a condition attributed to genetic throwbacks to seed sown by Mongol invaders during their decades of ravaging Europe. (Bad science, that, but Dr. Down’s son himself argued that imbeciles “derived from an earlier form of the Mongol stock and should be considered more ‘pre-human, rather than human.’ ”) Weatherford’s lively analysis restores the Mongols’ reputation, and it takes some wonderful learned detours—into, for instance, the history of the so-called Secret History of the Mongols, which the Nazis raced to translate in the hope that it would help them conquer Russia, as only the Mongols had succeeded in doing.
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.Pub Date: March 2, 2004
ISBN: 0-609-61062-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2003
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
An absorbing, wide-ranging story of humans’ relationship with the water.
A study of swimming as sport, survival method, basis for community, and route to physical and mental well-being.
For Bay Area writer Tsui (American Chinatown: A People's History of Five Neighborhoods, 2009), swimming is in her blood. As she recounts, her parents met in a Hong Kong swimming pool, and she often visited the beach as a child and competed on a swim team in high school. Midway through the engaging narrative, the author explains how she rejoined the team at age 40, just as her 6-year-old was signing up for the first time. Chronicling her interviews with scientists and swimmers alike, Tsui notes the many health benefits of swimming, some of which are mental. Swimmers often achieve the “flow” state and get their best ideas while in the water. Her travels took her from the California coast, where she dove for abalone and swam from Alcatraz back to San Francisco, to Tokyo, where she heard about the “samurai swimming” martial arts tradition. In Iceland, she met Guðlaugur Friðþórsson, a local celebrity who, in 1984, survived six hours in a winter sea after his fishing vessel capsized, earning him the nickname “the human seal.” Although humans are generally adapted to life on land, the author discovered that some have extra advantages in the water. The Bajau people of Indonesia, for instance, can do 10-minute free dives while hunting because their spleens are 50% larger than average. For most, though, it’s simply a matter of practice. Tsui discussed swimming with Dara Torres, who became the oldest Olympic swimmer at age 41, and swam with Kim Chambers, one of the few people to complete the daunting Oceans Seven marathon swim challenge. Drawing on personal experience, history, biology, and social science, the author conveys the appeal of “an unflinching giving-over to an element” and makes a convincing case for broader access to swimming education (372,000 people still drown annually).
An absorbing, wide-ranging story of humans’ relationship with the water.Pub Date: April 14, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-61620-786-1
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Algonquin
Review Posted Online: Jan. 4, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2020
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