Water Learning Resources

A booklist of recommended titles from the Center for the Book for learning about water (check with your local library!):

Carle, David, Introduction to Water in California, .  University of California Press, 2004. Part of the series California Natural History Guides. "This thoroughly engaging, concise book tells the story of California's most precious resource, tracing the journey of water in the state from the atmosphere to the snowpack to our faucets and foods." (from the publisher)  

De Villiers, Marq, Water: The Fate of our Most Precious Resource.  Houghton Mifflin, 2000. "The author, whose Boer childhood was spent on the edge of the Thirstland in South Africa, has had a lifelong fascination with water...His latest, winner of the Governor General’s Literary Award for Nonfiction in Canada, depicts the current extent of world water scarcity and national and international water policies and briefly provides guidelines for dealing with the coming world water crisis." – Library Journal

Davis, Margaret Leslie, Rivers in the Desert: William Mulholland and the Inventing of Los Angeles . HarperCollins, 1993. "An arresting biography of William Mulholland, the visionary Los Angeles Water Department engineer who designed the Owens Valley Aqueduct [which] devastated Owens Valley towns, farms and individuals, enriched speculators and fostered corruption." -- Publishers Weekly

deBuys, William and Myers, Joan Myers.  Salt Dreams: Land & Water in Low-Down California. University of New Mexico Press, 2001. A history of the Salton Sea, which has become a prophetic story of mounting environmental crises that impinge on the water supply of southern California's sixteen million people. "An absorbing record of the ideas and people that tamed the Colorado River and transformed southeastern California from a desert into one of the continent's great agricultural regions." – Publishers Weekly

Hundley, Norris Jr.  Water and the West: the Colorado River Compact and the Politics of Water in the American West. University of California Press, updated edition May 2009. "Back in print for the first time in over ten years, thoroughly expanded and updated to trace the continuing battles raging over the West's most valuable, and contentious, resource." (from the publisher)

Kelley, Robert.  Battling the Inland Sea: Floods, Public Policy, and the Sacramento Valley. University of California Press, 1998. "A powerful evocation of the losses and gains involved in battling the mighty Sacramento River. But more than this, it is an exploration of the national will as it sought to rearrange nature herself with such mixed results." Kevin Starr, author of the Americans and the California Dream

McClurg, Sue. Water & the Shaping of California. Available from the Water Education Foundation. "A masterful and lyrical combination of prose and images illustrating how Californians have invented themselves and the modern state of California... -- Norris Hundley

Reisner, Marc. Cadillac Desert: The American West and Its Disappearing Water. Penguin, 2003. A study of the economics, politics, and ecology of water that covers more than a century of desert reclamation in the American West.