'Deep Water' offers an incisive, searching, and beautifully written account of the emerging crisis over dams and the world's water. Reporting in the tradition of John McPhee and Peter Matthiessen, Jacques Leslie makes this crisis vivid through the stories of three figures: Medha Patkar, the world's foremost anti-dam activist; Thayer Scudder, an American anthropologist; and Don Blackmore, an Australian water manager.
Taking the reader to the sites of controversial dams -- the Sardar Sarovar in India, the Kariba in Zambia, the Murray River weir system in Australia -- Leslie shows why dams are at once the hope of developing nations and a blight on their people and landscape. 'Deep Water' is the best book written on the emerging water crisis.