Inventing Niagara: Beauty, Power, and Lies

Strand, Ginger

ISBN 10: 1400107717 ISBN 13: 9781400107711

Publisher: Tantor Media, Inc, 2008

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An exploration of Niagara Falls traces its history from natural wonder to engineering testament, in a report that reveals the impact of human development on the region and documents Niagara's ties to Native American rights, slavery, and the atomic bomb.

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Review

"As engaging as it is insightful, "Inventing Niagara" is a careful and caring study of how myth and machine have covered over a great natural place. Peeling back the myths and looking behind the machines, as she brilliantly does, Strand reveals who we have been and who we need to become." -- Curtis White, author of "The Spirit of Disobedience" and "The Middle Mind"

"Niagara Falls is where America discovered the sublime. And Ginger Strand has discovered everything that happened since. If you want to understand our relationship with the natural world, you better read this book." -- Bill McKibben, author of The Bill McKibben Reader

"Here we have two captivating stories -- one about America's most famous waterworks, and the other about how a self-proclaimed 'hydrogeek' schooled herself in the myths and meaning of the great falls. Displaying wit and verve on a scale worthy of her subject, Ginger Strand shows that Niagara has been harnessed, perhaps to a greater degree than any other of our natural wonders, to human purposes." -- Scott Russell Sanders, author of A Private History of Awe

"A brilliantly entertaining history of America's original natural wonder and its heedless boosters and failed visionaries." -- Mike Davis, author of City of Quartz and Planet of Slums

"As engaging as it is insightful, Inventing Niagara is a careful and caring study of how myth and machine have covered over a great natural place. Peeling back the myths and looking behind the machines, as she brilliantly does, Strand reveals who we have been and who we need to become." -- Curtis White, author of The Spirit of Disobedience and The Middle Mind

"This is a deep and exhilarating book. Its material could have been played for irony, but Strand chose profundity instead, burrowing down through self-conscious layers of artifice until she arrives at a place both strange and vital." -- David Gessner, author of Soaring with Fidel

About the Author

Ginger Strand, the author of the novel Flight, has published essays and fiction in many places, including Harper's, the New England Review, and Orion, where she is a contributing editor.
Karen White has been narrating and directing audiobooks for more than a dozen years and has well over one hundred books to her credit. Honored to be included among AudioFile's Best Voices 2010 and 2011, she is also an Audie Award finalist and has earned multiple AudioFile Earphones Awards for narration and direction.

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