A Story that Stands Like a Dam: Glen Canyon and the Struggle for the Soul of the West

In this classic narrative history of the construction of Glen Canyon Dam in the 1950s and 1960s, Russell Martin has captured the individual, cultural, political, and environmental dramas that brought about the environmental movement we know today.

Across the American West, calls for the removal of hydroelectric dams constructed during the Bureau of Reclamation's grand century of dam-building are ringing out. Five decades after its construction, Glen Canyon Dam is still at the vortex of controversy, both because of its impact on ecological processes downstream and its drowning of exquisite natural landscapes behind its headwall. A Story That Stands Like A Dam presents a struggle as compelling and relevant today as when it began.

"Martin brings to life the mixed bag of players who, in the fight over Glen Canyon, wrote the very rule book for the cat-and-mouse game that now incessantly pits the forces of development against the defenders of an ever-shrinking trickle of what used to be America's mightiest river. . . . He has done a masterful job." Chicago Tribune

"The story of Glen Canyon is also a story of lost innocence. Martin's book tells it wonderfully." Outside

"This is a crime novel with a body (Glen Canyon), a weapon (the dam), but no simple killer. . . . Read Martin's fine book. We have needed such a record of the war between our appetites and our dreams, and now we've got it." Los Angeles Times

"Russell Martin's extraordinary tale of what may prove to be the last big American dam ever built is narrative history as good as it gets." T.H. Watkins

"The building of Glen Canyon Dam ushered in the modern environmental movement, and Russell Martin's book tells that story forcefully, dramatically, and truthfully." David Brower

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