2018
First Published
4.00
Average Rating
212
Number of Pages
In 1963 the waters began rising behind Glen Canyon Dam and 170 miles of the Colorado River slowly disappeared as the riverbed and surrounding canyons filled with water. Environmentalists considered it a disaster and mourned Glen Canyon as gone forever. The Sierra Club joined forces with photographer Eliot Porter to document what would be lost under the dam’s waters, resulting in the publication of the landmark 1963 photobook The Place No One Glen Canyon on the Colorado . But in an unexpected victory that speaks to the pervasive disaster of climate change, the reservoir is now declining and the Colorado River is coming back. Photographers Byron Wolfe (born 1967) and Mark Klett (born 1952), along with writer Rebecca Solnit (born 1961), spent five years exploring the place as expectations and possibilities changed, and the river reemerged at the upper end of the reservoir. In dialogue with Porter’s book, Klett and Wolfe retraced the physical locations where Porter made his photographs, now often submerged by the reservoir’s waters. Solnit’s accompanying text meditates on the meanings and histories of the place, drawing from both the trio’s explorations and archival research. Drowned River is a book about climate change, about “the madness of the past and the terror of the future” (as Solnit puts it). But it is also a book about how photography can describe beauty and trouble simultaneously, and what it takes to understand a place and to come to terms with the changes we have set in motion.
Avg Rating
4.00
Number of Ratings
12
5 STARS
25%
4 STARS
58%
3 STARS
8%
2 STARS
8%
1 STARS
0%
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Author
Rebecca Solnit
Author · 32 books
Writer, historian, and activist Rebecca Solnit is the author of more than twenty books on feminism, western and indigenous history, popular power, social change and insurrection, wandering and walking, hope and disaster, including Call Them By Their True Names (Winner of the 2018 Kirkus Prize for Nonfiction), Cinderella Liberator, Men Explain Things to Me, The Mother of All Questions, and Hope in the Dark, and co-creator of the City of Women map, all published by Haymarket Books; a trilogy of atlases of American cities, The Faraway Nearby, A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities that Arise in Disaster, A Field Guide to Getting Lost, Wanderlust: A History of Walking, and River of Shadows: Eadweard Muybridge and the Technological Wild West (for which she received a Guggenheim, the National Book Critics Circle Award in criticism, and the Lannan Literary Award). Her forthcoming memoir, Recollections of My Nonexistence, is scheduled to release in March, 2020. A product of the California public education system from kindergarten to graduate school, she is a columnist at the Guardian and a regular contributor to Literary Hub.
