![]() ![]() It was a finalist for a National Book Critics’ Circle Award and inspired an award-winning documentary by the same name which was first broadcast in 1997. The year before Reisner’s untimely death at age 51, Cadillac Desert was 61st on a list of the 100 best nonfiction books in English in the 20th century, as compiled by a panel from the Modern Library, a division of Random House. ![]() Recent scientific analysis has confirmed most of the book’s prognostications. ![]() It documented the transformation of John Wesley Powell’s vision of a federal irrigation program into a perverse reality of pork-barrel spending and environmental devastation. It was, clearly, advocacy journalism, but journalism of the highest order fortified with a tremendous amount of research, study, and numerous face-to-face interviews. Marc Reisner’s masterpiece Cadillac Desert: The American West and Its Disappearing Water is as compelling today as it was on publication in 1986. ![]()
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