River Lost
The Life And Death Of The Columbia
"A River Lost is superbly reported and written with clarity, insight, and great skill."—Washington Post Book World
After a two-decade absence, Washington Post journalist Blaine Harden returned to his small-town birthplace in the Pacific Northwest to follow the rise and fall of the West's most thoroughly conquered river.
Harden's hometown, Moses Lake, Washington, could not have existed without massive irrigation schemes. His father, a Depression migrant trained as a welder, helped build dams and later worked at the secret Hanford plutonium plant. Now he and his neighbors, once considered patriots, stand accused of killing the river.
As Blaine Harden traveled the Columbia-by barge, car, and sometimes on foot-his past seemed both foreign and familiar. A personal narrative of rediscovery joined a narrative of…
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November 4, 1997Blaine Harden is a contributor to The Economist, PBS Frontline, and Foreign Policy and has formerly served as The Washington Post’s bureau chief in East Asia and Africa as well as a local and national correspondent for The New York Times and as a writer for the Times Magazine. He was also bureau chief in Warsaw, during the collapse of Communism and the breakup of Yugoslavia (1989-1993), and in Nairobi, where he covered sub-Saharan Africa (1985-1989). He is the author of four previous books: The Great Leader and the Fighter Pilot (Viking, 2015), Africa: Dispatches from a Fragile Continent (Norton, 1990), A River Lost: The Life and Death of the Columbia (Norton, 1996) and Escape From Camp 14 (Viking, 2012). Africa won a…