Recommended books about water, drought or the West

We asked readers of our newsletter what books they've read to understand water issues in the West. Here is a list that will be updated as more recommendations come in. You will find speculative fiction, a dissertation, various histories of water and more. Book descriptions are from Amazon, Goodreads or the reader who recommended the book. Email us your ideas of what to read at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..

• Bewilderment, by Richard Powers. "With its soaring descriptions of the natural world, its tantalizing vision of life beyond, and its account of a father and son’s ferocious love, Bewilderment marks Richard Powers’s most intimate and moving novel. At its heart lies the question: How can we tell our children the truth about this beautiful, imperiled planet?"
• Big Smelly Salty Lake that I Call Home, by Carla Trentelman. This dissertation is "a magnificent sociological study of how people relate to Great Salt Lake."
• Blue Gold: the Fight to Stop the Corporate Theft of the World’s Water, by Maude Barlow and Tony Clarke. "Maude Barlow and Tony Clarke, two of the most active opponents to the privatization of water show how, contrary to received wisdom, water mainly flows uphill to the wealthy. Our most basic resource may one day be limited: our consumption doubles every twenty years—twice the rate of population increase."
• Desert Water: The Future of Utah’s Water Resources, edited by Hal Crimmel. "Some of the essays are scientific and analytical; others literary and personal. Together they draw attention to problems that Utah residents and policy makers must address but also emphasize ways to build solutions."
• Downriver: Into the Future of Water in the West, by Heather Hansman. "Hansman follows the Green river from headwaters to confluence, telling the story of water use with beginner's mind. It captures the complexity of issues, while her journey puts the river in context of a valuable thing that's not just a "resource".
• Eager: The Surprising Secret Life of Beavers and Why They Matter, by Ben Goldfab. "Fur trade extermination of beavers radically altered the American landscape, making it drier and hotter.  Yet beaver reintroduction in Utah has met with opposition from the usual suspects.  A chapter in this book specifically talks about Utah and says that beavers could store as much or more water than proposed Bear River development."
• Elixir: A History of Water and Humankind, by Brian Fagan. "Fagan relates how every human society has been shaped by its relationship to our most essential resource. This sweeping narrative moves across the world, from ancient Greece and Rome, whose mighty aqueducts still supply modern cities, to China, where emperors marshaled armies of laborers in a centuries-long struggle to tame powerful rivers."
• Encounters with the Archdruid: Narratives About a Conservationist and Three of His Natural Enemies, by John McPhee. "Led by David Brower, the Sierra Club fends off mining, developers and dams. One chapter is about the history between Brower and Floyd Dominy who led the Bureau of Reclamation."
• Firewalkers, by Adrian Tchaikovsky. "The Earth is burning. Nothing can survive at the Anchor; not without water and power. But the ultra-rich, waiting for their ride off the dying Earth? They can buy water. And thanks to their investment, the sun can provide power."
• First Peoples of Great Salt Lake: A Cultural Landscape from Nevada to Wyoming (to be published in November 2023), by Steven Simms. "Great Salt Lake is a celebrated, world-recognized natural landmark. It, and the broader region bound to it, is also a thoroughly cultural landscape; generations of peoples made their lives there. In an eminently readable narrative, Steven Simms, one of the foremost archaeologists of the region, traces the scope of human history dating from the Pleistocene, when First Peoples interacted with the lapping waters of Lake Bonneville, to nearly the present day."
• Four Winds by Kristin Hannah. A "rich, sweeping novel that stunningly brings to life the Great Depression and the people who lived through it―the harsh realities that divided us as a nation and the enduring battle between the haves and the have-nots."
• Great Salt Lake Biology: A Terminal Lake in a Time of Change, edited by Bonnie Baxter and Jaimi K. Butler. "This is the first book ever published on Great Salt Lake biology as a comprehensive and unifying theme. The editors present a series of reviews written by Great Salt Lake experts who explore this saline lake from the microbial diversity to the invertebrates and the birds who eat them, along a dynamic salinity gradient."
• Jordan River Water Trail & Bike Path, by Elliott Mott. "The most useful guidebook to float Utah's Jordan River.  This book has the potential to create a whole new relationship with a damaged urban river!"
• Pompeii: A Novel, by Robert Harris. "A great novel in which the protagonist is a Roman water engineer."
• Raven's Exile: A Season on the Green River, by Ellen Meloy. "If you float the Green River through Desolation/Gray canyons, someone will have a copy of this book in their drybag." "The author chronicles a season on the Green River in Utah's red-rock canyon country, describing her impressions of the region from a series of rafting trips."
• Refuge: An Unnatural History of Family and Place, by Terry Tempest Williams."In the spring of 1983 Terry Tempest Williams learned that her mother was dying of cancer. That same season, The Great Salt Lake began to rise to record heights, threatening the Bear River Migratory Bird Refuge and the herons, owls, and snowy egrets that Williams, a poet and naturalist, had come to gauge her life by."
• Science be Dammed: How Ignoring Inconvenient Science Drained the Colorado River, by Eric Kuhn and John Fleck. An "alarming reminder of the high stakes in the management—and perils in the mismanagement—of water in the western United States.  It seems deceptively simple: even when clear evidence was available that the Colorado River could not sustain ambitious dreaming and planning by decision-makers throughout the twentieth century, river planners and political operatives irresponsibly made the least sustainable and most dangerous long-term decisions."
• The Great Salt Lake, by Dale L. Morgan. "Approached as history, geography, geology, or high adventure, The Great Salt Lake is fascinating reading. From the first Americans, through mountain men, religious empires, railroads, and resorts, the remnant of ancient Lake Bonneville has been a nexus for human history, uniting a haunting beauty with raw desolation, 'strangely removed from common experience.'"
• The Maddaddam Trilolgy, by Margaret Atwood. "In Oryx and Crake, a man struggles to survive in a world where he may be the last human. In search of answers, he embarks on a journey through the lush wilderness that was so recently a great city, until powerful corporations took mankind on an uncontrolled genetic engineering ride. In The Year of the Flood the long-feared waterless flood has occurred, altering Earth as we know it and obliterating most human life. And in Maddaddam a small group of survivors band together with the Children of Crake: the gentle, bioengineered quasi-human species who will inherit this new earth."
• The Overstory, by Richard Powers. A "sweeping, impassioned work of activism and resistance that is also a stunning evocation of - and paean to - the natural world."
• The Politics of Water Scarcity, Opposing Viewpoints Series, Susan Nichols. "Discusses the issues surrounding water scarcity, including what its causes are, how water can be used as a political tool, and what the solution to water scarcity is."
• The Secret Knowledge of Water, by Craig Childs. "His extraordinary treks through arid lands in search of water are an astonishing revelation of the natural world at its most extreme."
• The Source: How Rivers Made America and America Remade its Rivers, by Martin Doyle. "In this fresh and powerful work of environmental history, Martin Doyle tells the epic story of America and its rivers, from the U.S. Constitution’s roots in interstate river navigation, the origins of the Army Corps of Engineers, the discovery of gold in 1848, and the construction of the Hoover Dam and the TVA during the New Deal, to the failure of the levees in Hurricane Katrina and the water wars in the west."
• The Spiral Jetty Encyclo: Exploring Robert Smithson’s Earthwork through Time and Place. by Hikmet Sidney Loe. "The Spiral Jetty Encyclo draws on Smithson’s writings for encyclopedic entries that bring to light the context of the earthwork and Smithson’s many points of reference in creating it. "
• The Water Knife, by Paolo Bacigalupi. "The American Southwest has been decimated by drought. Nevada and Arizona skirmish over dwindling shares of the Colorado River, while California watches, deciding if it should just take the whole river all for itself. Into the fray steps Las Vegas water knife Angel Velasquez. Detective, assassin, and spy, Angel "cuts" water for the Southern Nevada Water Authority and its boss, Catherine Case, ensuring that her lush, luxurious arcology developments can bloom in the desert and that anyone who challenges her is left in the gutted-suburban dust."
• Water, a Biography, by Giulio Boccaletti. "Extraordinary for its monumental scope and piercing insightfulness, Water: A Biography richly enlarges our understanding of our relationship to—and fundamental reliance on—the most elemental substance on earth."
• Water – a Natural History, by Alice Outwater. "A wonderful discussion of water and water’s interactions with both the natural and human worlds."
• Water Resources, Foundations of Contemporary Environmental Studies Series, by Shimon Anisfeld. "In this concise introduction to water resources, Shimon Anisfeld explores the fundamental interactions between humans and water, including drinking, sanitation, irrigation, and power production. 
• Water: The Epic Struggle for Wealth, Power, and Civilization, by Steven Solomon. "In Water, esteemed journalist Steven Solomon describes a terrifying—and all too real—world in which access to fresh water has replaced oil as the primary cause of global conflicts that increasingly emanate from drought-ridden, overpopulated areas of the world."
• Where the Water Goes: Life and Death Along the Colorado, by David Owen. "The Colorado River is an essential resource for a surprisingly large part of the United States, and every gallon that flows down it is owned or claimed by someone. David Owen traces all that water from the Colorado’s headwaters to its parched terminus, once a verdant wetland but now a million-acre desert."