Book Notices

Lake Mead National Recreation Area:

A History of America’s First National Playground

BY JONATHAN FOSTER

Reno: University of Nevada Press, 2016. xv + 176 pp.

Paper, $21.95The Southwest’s iconic Hoover Dam is more recognizable than its associated world-class water parkland, Lake Meade. Whereas we have study after study on the Colorado River and Hoover Dam, Jonathan Foster’s Lake Mead National Recreation Area is among the few to cast light on the water body formed along the river’s course. Foster’s primary focus is on the reservoir as a recreational destination and the varying interests that manage or use it. As managers of the recreational area—the first of its kind—the National Park Service set the course for later water parklands management. Moreover, NPS management of Lake Mead made it difficult for the Park Service to claim the high ground on latter reclamation projects and signaled to the public the significance of the West’s reservoir-based recreation. The strength of the volume is in showing how diverse groups contested management of the reservoir, from federal agencies to special interests, politicians, and recreationists. In its first decades public access and use of the Lake Mead National Recreation Area was relatively unfettered; in more recent years increased water use in an age of drought and climate change has meant more restrictions and limitations on recreation use.

A New Form of Beauty:

Glen Canyon beyond Climate Change

PHOTOGRAPHS BY PETER GOIN,

ESSAYS BY PETER FRIEDERICITucson: University of Arizona Press, 2016. xv + 184 pp.

Cloth, $40.00The latest in a series of handsome coffee-table books, A New Form of Beauty captures Glen Canyon in striking scenes. Photographs organized into galleries—Artifacts, Flora and Fauna, Low Water—feature haunting images of a changed landscape as drought forces water to recede below full-reservoir levels. Text by Peter Friederici accompanies Peter Goin’s photographs. In a series of three brief essays, Friederici reflects on the disquiet of standing face-to-face with drought (and to see unfamiliarity in a landscape thought to be familiar), on water forecasts given realities of climate change, and on the path of acknowledging and even celebrating “our knowledge that we live at the end of nature, that the driver of the Earth’s powerful cycles has become us as much as it is the other thing” (123). In both words and images, this volume meditates not only on the transformation of a manmade reservoir but also on a regional transition and the subsequent realities occasioned by the scarcity of water.