The Frackers by Gregory Zuckerman

The United States experienced a major change in energy in the 2000s. Prior to the boom in oil and natural gas production, the nation was concerned  with declining production—oil production peaked in 1970—increasing demand and increasing reliance on foreign oil. New technology, particularly horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, have made previously challenging sources of oil and gas economically feasible to access. The result is increased energy supply, lower prices for natural gas, and less reliance on foreign sources.

 The story of this turnaround is not founded on government policies or one of the massive energy companies. These energy resources from shales and other difficult rocks have been made available by players who started out as small time wildcatters and landmen. They took the risk on developing difficult resources in the United States and developing the technologies that made them economically feasible. As politicians wrung their hands and big companies sought greener pasture oversees, these men held onto hope and kept digging until they found solutions.

 Gregory Zuckerman recounts the story of some of these men and the businesses they built in The Frackers. This is a book of business journalism. That is more interesting than it may sound. It is a story with some drama as players face ups and downs that sometimes lead to ruin and sometimes to outrageous wealth. It has had a significant impact on the American economy as well.

 It may be a uniquely American story, too. The United States is one of the very few countries in which individuals own the rights to the minerals, including oil and gas, that are under their land. This meant people could try even when it seemed they were likely to lose, and have little interference in their losses. A few of them lost and lost until they won and won big.

 Zuckerman acknowledges concerns related to fracking. He finds that the environmental concerns have been somewhat overblow, and that it can be done safely if appropriate measure are taken, though that hasn’t always been the case. Appropriate environmental regulation can protect human health and the environmental while continuing to give us access to these energy sources.

 Another concern is that low energy prices may reduce the impetus for developing alternative and renewable energy. This is still the best long-term option. Zuckerman finds some hope in the story of the frackers though. Their belief and persistence resulted in big changes, but it took time. The developers of the next generation energy sources may have their breakthrough, too, in the next couple of decades if they keep at it.

 If you’re interested in this book, you may also be interested in

Contents Under Pressure by Sylvia F. Munson

 Zuckerman, Gregory. The Frackers: The Outrageous Inside Story of the New Billionaire Wildcatters. New York: Portfolio/Penguin, 2013.

The Apparitionist by Peter Manseau

Photography was introduced to the United States at around the same time that a new religion was born in the nation. Spiritualism promised a connection to the dead in their realm through human mediums, and some thought photography might capture physical manifestations of spirits. Peter Manseau tells the story of the first spirit photographer in The Apparitionist.

The man who captured the first supposed spirit photograph was an amateur at the time. William Mumler thought he had made in error in cleaning the glass on which the photonegative was captured when a faint image appeared in a self-portrait he shot in 1862. He was using the photo studio owned by Hannah Stuart. The married photographer, soon to be widowed and soon after that to be Mrs. Mumler, was a Spiritualist, and she convinced him that the image was not an error, but an apparition. The photos caught the attention of the Spiritualist press, first in the New York-based Herald of Progress, then in Mumler’s hometown of Boston in the Beacon of Light, which published the address of the Stuart studio.

Soon the studio was producing many spirit photographs; they even took orders by mail from across the country. Bostonian Spiritualists compared photos and found evidence that Mumler was faking the images. Discredited, the Mumler’s moved to New York to quietly offer spirit photographs again. Their practice there let to criminal prosecution in 1869. Photographers knew of ways to produce such images, but no investigators could figure out what Mumler was doing. Though the judge gave did not suggest the photos actually captured images of spirits, he rejected the prosecution’s case because it did not adequately support the charges of fraud and similar crimes.

Even with such tepid vindication, the atmosphere in New York was too hot for the Mumlers, so they returned to Boston. Though Mumler continued to take spirit photos, he had developed a much deeper understanding of the art and science of photography. He developed a process that allowed for the direct reproduction of photos on newsprint; founded the Photo-Electrotype Company of Boston and licensed his process to companies in other cities. This allowed newspapers and magazines to less expensively reproduce images without preparing an engraving first.

Manseau also discussed the development of photography in the United States after the art was introduced here. This includes American pioneers of photography such as Samuel Morse, also inventor of the telegraph, and Civil War battlefield photographers Matthew Brady and Alexander Gardner.

If you’re interested in this book, you may also be interested in

The Age of Edison by Ernest Freeburg

Arthur & George by Julian Barnes

Billion Dollar Whale by Tom Wright and Bradley Hope

Buried Alive by Jan Bondeson

Chief Engineer by Erica Wagner

Empires of Light by Jill Jonnes

Enchantress of Numbers by Jennifer Chiaverini

The Explorer King by Robert Wilson

The Man Who Loved Books too Much by Allison Hoover Bartlett

The Real World of Sherlock Holmes by Peter Costello

Scan Artist by Marcia Biederman

Super Attractor by Gabrielle Bernstein

Manseau, Peter. The Apparitionists: A Tale of Phantoms, Fraud, Photography, and the Man Who Captured Lincoln’s Ghost. New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2017.

Interesting Stuff April 17, 2011

A funny Superman comic by Kerry Cullen
Banana Peels Can Remove Lead, Copper from Water
Boy Scouts to Add Merit Badge for Robotics
Commodore 64 is Back (I had a Vic 20)
The Day the Typewriter Died

Missouri Floods
-Missouri's Black River levee fails. Where floodwaters could hit next.
-MoDOT Traveler Information Map Offers Flood Information
-Volunteers work to stop flooding in Midwest, South

Interesting Stuff March 18, 2011
Nicolas Cage’s Stolen Action Comics #1 Recovered Unders Super Sketchy Circumstances
S.846: To designate the United States courthouse located at 80 Lafayette Street in Jefferson City, Missouri, as the Christopher S. Bond United States Courthouse
Should we tear down I-70 in St. Louis?
Urban Buildings Unplug from Water Grid
U.S. Population Centered in Missouri
Yuri Gagarin: First Man in Space

The Phantom Unmasked by Kevin Patrick

The Phantom is a long-running newspaper comic strip that first appeared in the New York Journal in 1936.  He was a pulp-adventure hero who protected his jungle home while fighting piracy and crime around the world. His unique twist, at least visually, was his outfit of tights and trunks, with a domino mask to obscure his features. More than a year before the appearance of Superman, the Phantom was dressing like a superhero.

In parts of the world, people consider the Phantom to be the very first superhero. Though he persists in American newspaper pages, he has not been very popular in the U.S. in comparison to similar characters. In other part so of the world, notably Australia, Sweden and India, he is possibly the most well-known and followed comics characters. How did a middling American adventure comic become so popular overseas? Comics scholar Kevin Patrick wrote a dissertation about it, and has since turned than dissertation into his book, The Phantom Unmasked.

It started with the general popularity of newspaper comic strips in the United States. As the American market became saturated, the features syndicates that distributed comics sought to expand by marketing to foreign publishers. While they faced objections in some markets, they had the advantage of being cheap and plentiful. In addition, the American syndicates worked with local syndicates or publishers to adapt their comics to local tastes and customs. This included The Phantom.

Lee Falk, writer of the strip, conceived of a character who was likely to be popular by taking ideas from popular jungle stories and hero pulps. He noted that he took inspiration form Edgar Rice Burroughs’ Tarzan of the Apes (serialize in All-Story magazine) and Rudyard Kipling’s The Jungle Book. The name of the Phantom is suggested by The Shadow, one of the most popular pulp magazines. The Phantom marked his enemies with the stamp of his skull ring, similar to the signet of The Spider, who more often left his mark on a corpse than a living foe. The skull-mark itself may have been inspired by the death’s head ring of Operator 5; though that ring was loaded with an explosive charge.

Patrick traces the spread of The Phantom from the United States to overseas markets, especially Sweden, which would become a center of oversees Phantom media production, India and his homeland of Australia. While he considers the features of the strip that make it popular in these countries, he also explores the marketing and publishing practices of the features syndicates in America and abroad to show how The Phantom was a financial as well as a popular success. The Phantom Unmasked is as much a business history as it is a comics history, though the two have always fit closely together.

If you’re interested in this book, you may also be interested in

Comic Book Nation by Bradford W. Wright

Kirby by Mark Evanier

Men of Tomorrow by Gerard Jones

Miss Mizzou by J. B. Winter

Mr. America by Mark Adams

The Secret History of Wonder Woman by Jill Lepore

Superman versus the Ku Klux Klan by Rick Bowers

The Peerless Peer by Philip Jose Farmer

Why Comics? by Hilary Chute

Patrick, Kevin. The Phantom Umasked: America’s First Superhero. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2017.

The Big Thirst by Charles Fishman

More than 1 billion people do not have access to clean drinking water.  Australia has suffered a decade-long, continent-wide drought.  Even seemingly water rich places, like Atlanta, Georgia, can’t get enough water.  Many are talking of a global water crisis.  Except, as Charles Fishman aptly states it in The Big Thirst, “There is no global water crisis, there are a thousand water crises, each distinct.”

I think the story of Atlanta and Lake Lanier, as told recounted by Fishman, is especially instructive.  Lake Lanier on the Chatahoochee River is the source of 75 percent of the water used by Atlanta, 5 million gallons a day.  A drought in 2007-2008 brought the level of the lake dangerously low, prompting downstream states to sue over the amount of water Atlanta was taking.  The federal court declared that Atlanta had been illegally receiving water from the lake and had to find another source.  Atlanta has a lot of resources, barely tapped conservation efforts, reuse, and alternative supplies, but with a lack of political will, leadership, and vision, it leaders threw up their hands in impotent defiance of the court and whined they must have Lake Lanier water.  When the lake was built, Atlanta passed on paying for a piece of it thinking it would never be needed, and now they think they can’t live without it.

Part of the point Fishman makes it that water crises are more often than not political crises.  There is a lack of political will and sense of necessity, even though the problems can be plain and the solutions within reach.  The Big Thirst includes examples from around the world (the United States, India, and especially Australia) where people are facing water problems.  Happily, many of them have taken a more realistic and reasonable approach than Atlanta.

Fishman is going for something deeper, though.  Our political and economic stumbling in the area of water management stems for our cultural relationship with water.  It is obviously necessary for life.  We also consider it beautiful, it is part of our landscape, and in some places it has important religious significance.  Even so, we have difficulty understanding the value of water, comparing one use to another, assigning responsibility for its distribution and quality, acknowledging the infrastructure needed to have water when and where it is needed.  It the West, where for the last century we have enjoyed incredible access to abundant water, we hardly ever think about water unless we have some professional connection to it.

We can’t continue to be mindless of water.  The systems of water abundance we built in the last century aren’t sustainable without major ongoing investment.  In light of climate change, they may be altogether unsustainable.  Even without climate change, much of our water policy dates to a time of unusual water abundance.

Fishman encourages water mindfulness.  We need to reconnect to water.  In part, this reconnecting means understanding what it means to have water in our homes and in our streams.  It is also connecting to how critical water is to food, energy, commerce, health, and almost every aspect of life.  Our decisions about water need to be rooted in reality.

If you’re interested in this book, you may also be interested in

Blue Revolution by Cynthia Barnett

Elixir by Brian Fagan

Water by Marq de Villiers

Water by Steven Solomon

When the Rivers Run Dry by Fred Pearce

I’ve also written about Atlanta and Lake Lanier at Infrastructure Watch:

Courts Could Affect Uses of Lake Lanier

Georgia Appeals Lake Lanier Decision

Georgia Loses Lake Lanier Battle

Judge Winnows Down Central Question in Lake Lanier Case

Fishman, Charles.  The Big Thirst: The Secret Life and Turbulent Future of Water.  New York: Free Press, 2011.

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Triumvirate by Bruce Chadwick

Chadwick, Bruce. Triumvirate: The Story of an Unlikely Alliance that Saved the Constitution and United the Nation. Naperville, IL: Sourcebooks, 2009.


A fragile nation risks falling apart as its ineffective and poorly organized government slides deeper into gridlock. Jealous geographic factions threaten to tear the fragile country apart. To fix these ills, a new form of government is proposed, but is greeted by many opponents. Three men orchestrate a campaign to overcome this opposition and see the new government approved. Along the way, they produce a series of essays that are still read by students of politics and democracy more than two centuries later.

This is the true story of the United States and the ratification of its Constitution. The men are James Madison, Alexander Hamilton and John Jay, authors of The Federalist. Bruce Chadwick recounts the tale in Triumvirate, a readable book of history that retains the sense of a story while conveying the facts.

The Federalist is well known, if no longer widely read, as a factor greatly advancing the cause of the Constitution’s supporters. What is less known is that it was only a part of a plan to rally support for the new government and give it a solid foundation by seeing through its ratification in every state.

The sense that comes from the books is that it is Madison, Hamilton and Jay’s early insight that a concerted effort was needed, and the steps they took to put together, organization and their supporters with forceful arguments for their cause, that carried the victory. Opponents of the plan, the Anti-Federalists, seemed to be in the majority in the larger states and included brilliant, respected and patriotic men who also forcefully argued their cause in essays and assemblies. However, Anti-Federalists disliked the Constitution for different reason, lacked clear leaders, were late to organize and had no coherent, consistent set of arguments for their position.

It’s easy to paint the Anti-Federalists as shortsighted enemies of union, as the Federalists did. Many wanted nothing more than a bill of rights added to a plan of government they otherwise liked, though some had additional objections. Chadwick treats the Anti-Federalists fairly and points out the weaknesses and blind spots of the Federalists.

If you’re interested in this book, you may also be interested in
46 Pages by Scott Liell
Common Sense by Thomas Paine
His Excellency by Joseph J. Ellis
The Politically Incorrect Guide to Western Civilization by Anthony Esolen

Buried Alive by Jan Bondeson

Bondeson, Jan. Buried Alive: The Terrifying History of Our Most Primal Fear. 2001. New York: Norton, 2002.

The stories are horrific. Sick people, men, women and children alike, are mistakenly declared dead by ignorant officials, careless medics and, worst of all, their own families, and confined to the grave while still alive. They wake in their coffins, nailed in, sometimes in time to be saved by a watchful attendant, sometimes to have their feeble cries ignored by the uncaring or hushed by the superstitious, sometimes too suffer a second, more terrifying, death. In these last cases, belated exhumations reveal bodies broken and twisted by impossible efforts to escape. Most of these stories are false.

That is the fortunate conclusion of Dr. Bondeson. His exploration of fear of premature burial spans history, society, literature and medicine over the course of centuries.

Fear of live interment peaked in Europe in the 18th and 19th centuries. This was a time when medical professionals lost faith in the signs of death and common people lost faith in the medical profession. Such a fear now, in the west where modern medical practice is well established, would be considered irrational, but in those days, it was more reasonable, even if it was unlikely to occur.

In Germany, the view prevailed that only putrefaction was a sure sign of death, and it sparked the building of hospitals for the uncertainly dead, where attendants closely watched corpses for signs of life until sufficient decay confirmed its absence. Similar views later prevailed in France, though it did not build similar mortuaries. Anti-premature-burial was always a minority movement in English speaking nations, but adherents held out the longest in the United States and United Kingdom through ties to spiritualism, fringe medicine and other groups.


Bondeson shows the folly of the sensationalists who stirred live burial fears, but shows some sympathy for the true philanthropists who took up the cause. He doesn’t even rule it out today in undeveloped areas where modern methods for diagnosing death don’t prevail.

Buried Alive contains more than a few page-long paragraphs, but it is very readable. The tone is not academic and Bondeson’s enthusiasm for the subject is infectious. He handles some of the more lurid and sensational aspects of the history and literature with tongue-in-cheek humor.

The Power Makers by Maury Klein

Maury Klein’s book The Power Makers is a history of power from the Thomas Newcomen’s steam engine to the foundations of America’s electric grid.

Unlike many historians who look at the history of electric power, Klein gives a lot of attention to steam. We haven’t had steam engines directly powering industrial plants for decades, but steam turbines are still central to the production of most electricity in the United States. Even nuclear power plants use steam turbines to run their generators, they just use the heat from nuclear reactions rather than from the combustion of coal or natural gas to boil water and heat the steam to more than a thousand degrees.

Klein gives attention to many lesser known names in the history of power. He shows that Thomas Edison and George Westinghouse had rivals other than each other, such as Elihu Thomson. Nikola Tesla is well known as the genius who invented the AC motor, but other engineers helped develop his prototype into a commercial product, such as mathematically talented engineer Benjamin Lamme. Many talented inventors tried their hands at making electric lighting and power systems better. Only some of them had the vision, business sense, good partners and luck to turn their ideas into successful products. Few of them are widely known today.

Electrification had clear, direct effects in industry and transportation. Klein discusses how it’s influence reached into other sectors of the economy. Corporate management and finance changed to meet the needs of a growing new technology. For instance, Edison General Electric was able to take advantage of a new New Jersey law that allowed corporations to own businesses in other states. Electric companies grew, expanded and consolidated through numerous mergers and acquisitions. They had a demand for capital that nearly rivaled the railroads, another transformative technology that had shortly preceded electric power.

As the availability of electricity grew, certain industries were able to grow, too. Some chemical and metals manufacturing required abundant electric power to catalyze chemical reactions or generate the high temperatures of electric furnaces. Manufacturers flocked to Niagara after a lager hydroelectric power station started operation there in 1895.

Klein brings the many thread of his story of power together by reflections on three great fairs: the 1876 Centennial Exhibition in Philadelphia, the 1893 Columbian Exposition in Chicago and the 1939 New York World’s Fair. In the first, a giant steam engine that powered exhibits by means of belts and pulley was a significant attraction. By the second, electricity was on display, and the White City fairground was a model for testing AC power systems. By the 1939 fair, large power utilities of the type we would recognize today were becoming common. By then it was no big deal to flip a switch or pull a lever and get power so, unlike the previous to fairs, no dignitary undertook a show of doing it; the power was on from the start.

If you’re interested in this book, you may also be interested in

The Age of Edison by Ernest Freeburg

Empires of Light by Jill Jonnes

The Grid by Gretchen Bakke

How We Got to Now by Steven Johnson

The Lighthouse Stevensons by Bella Bathurst

Lights Out by Ted Koppel

Make a Joyful Sound by Helen Elmira Waite

1939 by David Gelernter

Planck by Brandon R. Brown

The Powerhouse by Steve Levine

Rust by Jonathan Waldman

Steam by Andrea Sutcliffe 

Technology in World Civilization by Arnold Pacey

Klein, Maury. The Power Makers: Steam, Electricity, and the Men Who Invented Modern America. New York: Bloomsbury Press, 2008.

Mayflower by Nathaniel Philbrick

Philbrick, Nathaniel. Mayflower: A Story of Courage, Community, and War. New York: Viking, 2006.



In Mayflower, Nathaniel Philbrick writes about the Plymouth Colony from the Pilgrim’s flight from Europe to the end of King Philip’s War. It is mainly a story of how the settler’s and their descendants related to the natives.

It was by no means certain that the Pilgrims would get along with the Indians. They were chiefly concerned with building a community on their religious convictions, strong beliefs they held on to in spite of persecution in England. In the New World, they would do things their way.

Even so, they were surprisingly humble. The hardships they faced in America were enough to humble anyone. They quickly realized their dependence on the sufferance of the native populations. Unwittingly, they had upset the political balance of the Indian tribes.

Massasoit was the leader of a tribe that was weakened by disease and other setbacks. Once one of the leading tribes in the regions, the Pokanokets were in danger of being subdued by their rivals. Massasoit, their sachem, built and alliance with the Pilgrims at Plymouth that kept him in a strong position.

This is only the beginning of the political intrigues that run through the history of the Plymouth colony. Many native leaders and would-be sachems used the English, their technology, and the fear many Indians felt to carve out a place for themselves in the dangerous world of inter-tribal politics.

Against this backdrop, the Pilgrims cultivated allies amongst the Indians. Though their desire for religious purity may caused them to separate themselves from the churches in England may have tended to isolate them, the discipline, self-control, humility, and justice required by their faith made them more palatable to the natives than other European settlers.

Things changed quickly within a couple of generations. The Pilgrims were chiefly interested in their religious community, but their immediate descendants were interested in land and the wealth it brought. This inevitably led to competition for resources. The Indians became resentful and the English shed humility as they gained power.

Massasoit’s grandson, Philip, doesn’t seem like a fighter. In fact, he was generally a runner. Even so, he was the spark that set ablaze a war in New England. The sachems before him sold much land to the settlers and Philip found himself without the resources to support his people. He strung things along for a while using threats and capitulations to get what he needed from the English, much like today’s small nuclear states do to the Western countries on a global scale. Plymouth officials became too high-handed with Philip and soon events and the resentments of his young warriors pushed the sachem into war.

The action of the war chapters makes them more interesting reading, but they tell an awful tale. The English killed, enslaved or displace half the native population of southern New England. The land they coveted was theirs for the taking, though Plymouth was so indebted after the war, it couldn’t afford the expansion.

The expulsion of Indians made the frontiers more dangerous. Friendly natives had once buffered the settlers from hostile tribes. Now a settler clearing the frontier was likely to be surrounded by hostile tribes and have no hope of help if they decided to purge foreigners.

As the United States expanded, the Pilgrims and King Philip’s War became lost history outside of New England. When they were brought back to popular knowledge, it was as stories transformed to be suitable for new times. Philbrick puts aside the romanticized tale of Thanksgiving not to debunk it, but to present the Pilgrims and Indians more as they were.

Nathanial Philbrick also wrote
Sea of Glory

If you’re interested in this book, you may might like
Undaunted Courage by Stephen Ambrose

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Better for All the World by Harry Bruinius

Harry Bruinius takes the title of his book, Better for All the World, from a quote from famous United States Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.  In his opinion, written for a court majority that authorized states to forcibly sterilize some people, Holmes expressed the notion that it was better to sterilize a defective person than to permit them to have defective children who may place greater burden on government systems for justice and welfare.

This legal justification for forced sterilization was just one of the policy victories of the eugenics movement in the America. Eugenicists were also influential in establishing state marriage laws and federal immigration quotas and restrictions.

Even from its start, notions of social engineering and politics tinged the science of eugenics. Francis Galton coined the word that applied to both the study of heredity and the improvement of humanity through selective breeding over generations. Galton established the field based on concepts from his cousin Charles Darwin’s books on evolution, Gregor Mendel’s studies of plant heredity, and his own statistical studies of human characteristics. Though he mostly kept these speculations to himself, he considered the possibility of improving humans through breeding just as farmers improved plants and livestock.

American reformers of all political persuasion welcomed Galton’s ideas; they were looking for reliable, scientific means of tackling poverty and crime. Galton’s method were used to study families and supposedly proved that traits related to poverty, criminality, low intelligence, and the harder to recognize (therefore more dangerous) feeblemindedness. These studies also uncover a troubling pairing in females of feeblemindedness and fecundity. The implication was that the good stock of moral, productive Americans risked overrun by a class of hereditary degenerates. America’s best needed to produce larger family, and its poor and feebleminded needed to be restrained from passing on their inferior traits.

Much of Bruinius’ book focuses on this American eugenics movement. Representing leadership in the scientific community is Charles Davenport. He popularized the work of Galton, convinced the Carnegie Institute to fund a station to study eugenics, and did research that contributed to the early development of genetics. Representing the bridge between science and policy is Harry Laughlin. A Missourian and a protégé of Davenport, his reports and advice to Congress helped to inform restrictive immigration policy and support state programs of forced sterilization of convicts and the feebleminded, ultimately upheld in by the Supreme Court, as previously mentioned, in the case of Buck vs. Bell.

The development of eugenics policy in the U.S. was being watched overseas. In particularly, racial purity laws enacted by the Nazis in Germany explicitly cited American research and legal precedents. Many reformers in America and elsewhere were gratified by the apparent success of eugenics policies in Germany.

Even as it was reaching its peak as a political reform movement, laboratory science was undermining eugenics. Laboratory studies of the mechanisms of heredity, which had discovered chromosomes by the 1930s, were showing that heredity and the expression of traits, especially moral or personality traits, were much more complicated and harder to predict than the eugenicists assumed. Through its association with the Nazis, eugenics became wholly discredited in the public mind, though its effects lingered in American policies for decades.

Our understanding of genetics and heredity has improved a lot. Biotechnology has made a new kind of genetic engineering possible. The eugenicist dreams of eliminating disease and creating better people in future generations is more attainable than ever, at least in limited ways.

If this puts our evolution in our hands, are we ethically and morally evolved enough to use this power? Are humans intelligent animals or are we unique creatures? Are human rights inalienable characteristics of human beings, or are they social constructs, ideas that can rise, fade, or change like other ideas? How does the good of the species relate to the good of the individual? What does it mean to be a parent? The way we answer these questions, and other related to the implications of our science and technology, will establish what kind of people we are, and possibly the destiny of generations to come.

If you’re interested in this book, you may also be interested in

A Little History of Science by William Bynum

The Abolition of Man by C. S. Lewis

The Ghost Map by Steven Johnson

IBM and the Holocaust by Edwin Black

Maus by Art Spiegelman

Men of Tomorrow by Gerard Jones

War Against the Weak by Edwin Black

Bruinius, Harry. Better for All the World: The Secret History of Forced Sterilization and America’s Quest for Racial Purity. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2006.

Water by Steven Solomon (204)

Solomon, Steven. Water: The Epic Struggle for Wealth, Power, and Civilization. New York: Harper, 2010.
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Steven Solomon’s Water is an epic history of civilization from its roots to modern time. Solomon’s thesis is that inventively mastered their water resources have risen and those that have outpaced their available water or innovations have declined. There are lessons in this history for us who live in an age where some nations already experience serious water scarcity and even relatively water rich nations are squandering their natural fortune.

The book generally follows sequences of technology, geography, and politics. In technology, it moves through waters many uses from irrigation to transportation, energy and sanitation. The geographic motion of the book is from east to west, starting the early innovations of Asia, sliding to Europe, then jumping the Atlantic to North America. The political trend begins with ancient, totalitarian hydraulic societies and moves on to gradually democratizing nations and the splintered, competitive, yet surprisingly workable and cooperative, market-oriented Western republics.

In the final chapters of the book, Solomon deals with the threat of water scarcity. Some parts of the world, particularly in Africa and Asia, are already facing water shortages. Those fortunate enough to have other sources of wealth, like oil, are importing virtual water, especially in the form of food. Control of water resources is becoming a matter of international diplomacy, national security, and possible war in much the way oil was in the last century. This is especially true in the arid, populous Middle East and South Asia. Many of the water poor live in lands that are highly populated, arid, unstable politically, and have long-standing enmities with neighboring countries.

Relatively water rich nations, like the United States, have problems, too. Much of it stems from using water inefficiently and for less productive activities. This is especially problematic in the dry western states, where long-standing, vested interests have sought to protect their subsidized access to water while others, sometimes more efficient and high value users, pay great premiums for the limited remaining available water. This isn’t strictly a western problem; eastern cities are also droughts, growing populations, industrialization, intensive agriculture, and aging infrastructure that strain their water resources.

While the problems are serious, Solomon seems hopeful that, as in the past, we may be able to develop technological, organizational, and political solutions to these issues. He objectively discusses national and international efforts to solve the looming water crisis. He seems to have more faith that workable solutions well arise in the more water rich, democratic West, where a combination of government regulation, free markets, substantial local control, and varied regional solutions are giving rise to innovation.

If you’re interested in this book, you may also be interested in
The Ancient Engineers by L. Sprague de Camp
Canals and Their Architecture by Robert Harris
Dreams of Iron and Steel by Deborah Cadbury
Exodus
The Ghost Map by Steven Johnson
The Great Stink by Clare Clark
Steam by Andrea Sutcliffe
Undaunted Courage by Stephen Ambrose
The Victory of Reason by Rodney Stark
Water by Marq de Villiers
When the Rivers Run Dry by Fred Pearce