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Pulled between the disparate spheres of homelife with his minister father and the world of sex, drugs, and violence of his closest friends, author Stephen Haven relates his journey of self-discovery in this poignant memoir. After a fourteen-year absence from his home in Amsterdam, New York, Haven returns to the streets that molded his character. Through memories of his adolescence, Haven relives his youth in this economically deprived community and explores the values of friendship, loyalty, and privilege. A true bildungsroman, The River Lock traces the forging of Haven’s identity from the clash of the two worlds of his youth-home and street. His return to his childhood past allows Haven to understand and describe how his growing understanding of art, culture, spirituality, and class melded to create a man able to live fully in two distinct worlds, the foundation of the man he is today.
If changed by development, the authors found the present Osage valley landscape expressive. Illustrated with hundreds of color photographs, period maps, and vintage images, this book tells the dramatic saga of human ambition pitted against natural limitations and forces beyond man's control.
This book celebrates the lives of those who were involved in the works which flowed from the River Murray Waters Act of 1915. The focus is on the first nine locks and weirs which were built by South Australia over a period of twenty years. Combining oral history and archival research, Helen Stagg shares stories of the construction communities whose itinerant lifestyle led to them being referred to as 'the great wandering class'. However, the communities are shown to have been relatively settled with their own school and with an active social and sporting calendar. Dances, silent movies, horse races, carnivals and occasional visiting entertainers provided a balance for the difficult living and working conditions. Health care was precarious and hardship affected many; work-time was reduced, accidents were common and tragedy took a toll but the people faced these issues together. The second part of the book consists of the memories of seven people who were children of lock builders. In addition, there are details of over 500 accidents, petitions signed by the lock families for services and a chronology of events. Today, irrigation and a reliable water supply sustain towns and cities along the Murray River and scores of riverboats enjoy ready transit through the locks. This book provides an insight into the life and times of the resilient people who harnessed the River Murray between 1915 and 1935.
In 1824, a group of prominent Hartford businessmen formed the Connecticut River Company to construct a canal that would bypass the treacherous rapids of Enfield Falls and extend navigation along the Connecticut River. Soon boats were a frequent sight in the village of Windsor Locks, named after the locks of the canal that ran alongside Main Street. Mills also sprang up in the area, utilizing the canals water to power their manufacturing operations. Today the canal has taken on a more historical, ecological, and recreational significance. Home to diverse plant and animal species, it is an excellent place to enjoy sweeping views of the Connecticut River and to see the factories that played a big part in the regions history.
The St. Lawrence Seaway was considered one of the world's greatest engineering achievements when it opened in 1959. The $1 billion project-a series of locks, canals, and dams that tamed the ferocious St. Lawrence River-opened the Great Lakes to the global shipping industry. Linking ports on lakes Superior, Michigan, Huron, Erie, and Ontario to shipping hubs on the world's seven seas increased global trade in the Great Lakes region. But it came at an extraordinarily high price. Foreign species that immigrated into the lakes in ocean freighters' ballast water tanks unleashed a biological shift that reconfigured the world's largest freshwater ecosystems. Pandora's Locks is the story of politicians and engineers who, driven by hubris and handicapped by ignorance, demanded that the Seaway be built at any cost. It is the tragic tale of government agencies that could have prevented ocean freighters from laying waste to the Great Lakes ecosystems, but failed to act until it was too late. Blending science with compelling personal accounts, this book is the first comprehensive account of how inviting transoceanic freighters into North America's freshwater seas transformed these wondrous lakes.
In 1988, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers began an investigation of the benefits and costs of extending several locks on the lower portion of the Upper Mississippi River-Illinois Waterway (UMR-IWW) in order to relieve increasing waterway congestion, particularly for grain moving to New Orleans for export. With passage of the Flood Control Act of 1936, Congress required that the Corps conduct a benefit-cost analysis as part of its water resources project planning; Congress will fund water resources projects only if a project's benefits exceed its costs. As economic analysis generally, and benefit-cost analysis in particular, has become more sophisticated, and as environmental and social considerations and analysis have become more important, Corps planning studies have grown in size and complexity. The difficulty in commensurating market and nonmarket costs and benefits also presents the Corps with a significant challenge. The Corps' analysis of the UMR-IWW has extended over a decade, has cost roughly $50 million, and has involved consultations with other federal agencies, state conservation agencies, and local citizens. The analysis has included many consultants and has produced dozens of reports. In February 2000, the U.S. Department of Defense (DOD) requested that the National Academies review the Corps' final feasibility report. After discussions and negotiations with DOD, in April 2000 the National Academies launched this review and appointed an expert committee to carry it out.
While John McPhee was working on his previous book, Rising from the Plains, he happened to walk by the engineering building at the University of Wyoming, where words etched in limestone said: "Strive on--the control of Nature is won, not given." In the morning sunlight, that central phrase--"the control of nature"--seemed to sparkle with unintended ambiguity. Bilateral, symmetrical, it could with equal speed travel in opposite directions. For some years, he had been planning a book about places in the world where people have been engaged in all-out battles with nature, about (in the words of the book itself) "any struggle against natural forces--heroic or venal, rash or well advised--when human beings conscript themselves to fight against the earth, to take what is not given, to rout the destroying enemy, to surround the base of Mt. Olympus demanding and expecting the surrender of the gods." His interest had first been sparked when he went into the Atchafalaya--the largest river swamp in North America--and had learned that virtually all of its waters were metered and rationed by a U.S. Army Corps of Engineers' project called Old River Control. In the natural cycles of the Mississippi's deltaic plain, the time had come for the Mississippi to change course, to shift its mouth more than a hundred miles and go down the Atchafalaya, one of its distributary branches. The United States could not afford that--for New Orleans, Baton Rouge, and all the industries that lie between would be cut off from river commerce with the rest of the nation. At a place called Old River, the Corps therefore had built a great fortress--part dam, part valve--to restrain the flow of the Atchafalaya and compel the Mississippi to stay where it is. In Iceland, in 1973, an island split open without warning and huge volumes of lava began moving in the direction of a harbor scarcely half a mile away. It was not only Iceland's premier fishing port (accounting for a large percentage of Iceland's export economy) but it was also the only harbor along the nation's southern coast. As the lava threatened to fill the harbor and wipe it out, a physicist named Thorbjorn Sigurgeirsson suggested a way to fight against the flowing red rock--initiating an all-out endeavor unique in human history. On the big island of Hawaii, one of the world's two must eruptive hot spots, people are not unmindful of the Icelandic example. McPhee went to Hawaii to talk with them and to walk beside the edges of a molten lake and incandescent rivers. Some of the more expensive real estate in Los Angeles is up against mountains that are rising and disintegrating as rapidly as any in the world. After a complex coincidence of natural events, boulders will flow out of these mountains like fish eggs, mixed with mud, sand, and smaller rocks in a cascading mass known as debris flow. Plucking up trees and cars, bursting through doors and windows, filling up houses to their eaves, debris flows threaten the lives of people living in and near Los Angeles' famous canyons. At extraordinary expense the city has built a hundred and fifty stadium-like basins in a daring effort to catch the debris. Taking us deep into these contested territories, McPhee details the strategies and tactics through which people attempt to control nature. Most striking in his vivid depiction of the main contestants: nature in complex and awesome guises, and those who would attempt to wrest control from her--stubborn, often ingenious, and always arresting characters.
A heatwave melts London as Holmes and Watson are called to action in this new Sherlock Holmes adventure by Bonnie MacBird, author of “one of the best Sherlock Holmes novels of recent memory.”
The Hudson River Valley, 1769: A man mysteriously disappears without a trace, abandoning his wife and children on their farm at the foot of the Catskill Mountains. At first many believe that his wife, who has the reputation of being a scold, has driven her husband away, but as the strange circumstances of his disappearance circulate, a darker story unfolds. And as the lines between myth and reality fade in the wilderness, and an American nation struggles to emerge, the lost man’s wife embarks on a desperate journey to find the means to ensure her family’s survival . . .