Dead Pool: Lake Powell, Global Warming, and the Future of Water in the West
James Lawrence Powell
304 pages, hardcover: $27.50.
University of California, 2008.

In 1893, at a meeting of the International Irrigation Congress, Major John Wesley Powell, known for his daring exploration of the Colorado River, stood up to grand applause in front of men eager to build big water projects. And then he said what nobody wanted to hear. As the applause turned to boos and hisses, the major stated clearly: "I tell you, gentlemen, you are piling up a heritage of conflict and litigation over water rights, for there is not sufficient water to supply these lands."

Powell's words were a prophecy, and they set the tone for Dead Pool by James Lawrence Powell (no relation to the major). The book is a lively and comprehensive account of the ruinous policies that dominate the history of water in the West and threaten the region's very survival.

My Picks of the Month — June 2009

It has been apparent for generations now that America’s schools are falling behind other nations in teaching the most basic fundamentals of reading, writing and arithmetic. If you want to know why, read John Taylor Gatto’s Weapons of Mass Instruction: A School Teacher’s Journey through the Dark World of Compulsory Schooling ($24.95, New Society Publishers). You will learn how the Prussian form of education was imported to America in the mid-1800s to impose a deliberate program to ensure that America’s school children’s attitudes would be uniform, that they would emerge from school ready to be the cookie-cutter population needed to work in the nation’s factories and offices.

This control over our schools, always regarded as a local matter, has now been fully usurped by the federal government despite the fact that the Constitution makes no mention of education, regarding it as a matter for the states and local communities. Gatto, who spent thirty years as a teacher in New York City schools, provides a detailed and brilliant analysis of what America’s educational system has been undermined by both the government and the American Education Association, a teacher’s union.

Schools in recent times have become dangerous places for students who are now caught in a strait-jacket of test-based education that leaves them ill-suited for college or the real world. “The rigid stupidities of forced schooling, its linear logics, its bell curves, its buzzers and tests and multiple humiliations, its resort to magical spells, fills me with rage these days as an old man.”