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| Inventing Niagara: Beauty, Power, and Lies | 
 enlarge | Author: Ginger Strand
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Category: Book
List Price: $25.00
Buy New: $12.00
You Save: $13.00 (52%)
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Avg. Customer Rating:  8 reviews
Sales Rank: 26178
Media: Hardcover
Edition: 1
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 352
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.8
Dimensions (in): 9.2 x 6.1 x 1.1
ISBN: 1416546561
Dewey Decimal Number: 304.20971339
EAN: 9781416546566
ASIN: 1416546561
Publication Date: May 6, 2008
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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Product Description
Americans call Niagara Falls a natural wonder, but the Falls aren't very natural anymore. In fact, they are a study in artifice. Water diverted, riverbed reshaped, brink stabilized and landscape redesigned, the Falls are more a monument to man's meddling than to nature's strength. Held up as an example of something real, they are hemmed in with fakery -- waxworks, haunted houses, IMAX films and ersatz Indian tales. A symbol of American manifest destiny, they are shared politely with Canada. Emblem of nature's power, they are completely human-controlled. Archetype of natural beauty, they belie an ugly environmental legacy still bubbling up from below. On every level, Niagara Falls is a monument to how America falsifies nature, reshaping its contours and redirecting its force while claiming to submit to its will.Combining history, reportage and personal narrative, Inventing Niagara traces Niagara's journey from sublime icon to engineering marvel to camp spectacle. Along the way, Ginger Strand uncovers the hidden history of America's waterfall: the Mohawk chief who wrested the Falls from his adopted tribe, the revered town father who secretly assisted slave catchers, the wartime workers who unknowingly helped build the Bomb and the building contractor who bought and sold a pharaoh. With an uncanny ability to zero in on the buried truth, Strand introduces us to underwater dams, freaks of nature, mythical maidens and 280,000 radioactive mice buried at Niagara. From LaSalle to Lincoln to Los Alamos, Mohawks to Marilyn, Niagara's story is America's story, a tale of dreams founded on the mastery of nature. At a time of increasing environmental crisis, Inventing Niagara shows us how understanding the cultural history of nature might help us rethink our place in it today.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 3 more reviews...
The Eternal, Ever-Changing Niagara June 20, 2008
6 out of 7 found this review helpful
There may be many reasons for going to Niagara Falls. Sure, you have to be awed by the spectacular falls themselves. You might go to start up a marriage, or to re-start one. You might go gamble. "I went to Niagara Falls because I wanted to laugh at it," says Ginger Strand, author of _Inventing Niagara: Beauty, Power, and Lies_ (Simon and Schuster), and she finds plenty of the historical and regional environs funny. But wanting to laugh was the reason she went there during her college years, just to smirk at the tackiness and kitsch. She has been going back, though, over and over since then, because "I do love hydroinfrastructure - water tunnels, reservoirs, canals, sewers, aqueducts." She finds it inspiring, but she also finds that the natural wonder that everyone loves about the falls is not natural at all. It has been used, changed, prettified, trivialized, exploited, and poisoned. There is thus a great deal of amusement in this wide-ranging account, but a good deal of loss and sadness as well.
"Niagara Falls as a natural wonder does not exist anymore." It is originally hard to believe this. It is not surprising that the water does not fall exactly as it did three hundred, or three thousand, years ago, but it is surprising how much people have made the changes happen in recent years. This is not entirely because of using the water for hydroelectric power, although this is certainly one cause of the change. The waterfall has hours of operation. In the summer, and during the daytime, when people come to see the falls in action, the water gets turned up to maximum flow. At night, it gets dialed back "like a fancy massaging showerhead" so that more electricity is generated. No more than half the water that could go over the falls actually does so, and an engineer assures Strand that yes, if they wanted, the power companies could divert all the water to the generators with none for the tourists. The effect on the scenery of the reduced flow has been minimized by huge engineering projects, tinkering with the flow and diverting it so that it goes evenly over Horseshoe Falls, for instance. The fall of the water is not all that has changed, of course. The "Free Niagara" movement, guided by the famous landscape architect Frederic Law Olmsted, proposed to make the surroundings of the falls to be picturesque and spiritually elevating. Strand writes that this was questionable social engineering. Worse than that, it hid the hydrodynamic and chemical exploitation of the area as industry sprang up to take advantage of the water's power. Only later did atrocities like the toxic dumps of the Love Canal come to light. There is a long history of utopian dreams for the region, but few of them have come true.
Much of Strand's book is therefore distressing. Humans have tried to do what they always try to do, take control of nature for reasons esthetic, and especially commercial, and whatever successes have come are inextricably linked to failures. The pessimism does not mean that Strand's book is preachy. There are stories of shrunken heads here, and Jo-Jo the Dog-Faced Boy, and fake Indian legends, and of course the peculiar thrills of those who go over the falls in barrels. There is a great deal of fun here. Strand writes, "On every level, Niagara Falls is a monument to the ways America falsifies its relationship to nature, reshaping its contours, redirecting its force, claiming to submit to its will while imposing our own upon it." There is plenty of documentation here of this theme, but Strand still travels to Niagara every chance she gets. She is continually amazed at the landfills or the other examples of disharmony with nature, but that's not important. The real amazement, and she writes about it heartily and endearingly, comes from the big, green spectacle of water, falling. Anyone reading this entertaining account will understand how well-placed is her obsession.
I loved this book. June 2, 2008
4 out of 4 found this review helpful
Strand takes history, engineering, and environmentalism and makes it come alive. Her writing style compelled me to keep reading and I learned so much about a region I must have learned, and retained nothing about, in school. Strand's personalization of her research and her travels only made it more interesting to me. I look forward to reading much more of her writing in the future.
 Only Half the Book I Hoped For May 30, 2008
3 out of 8 found this review helpful
Ginger Strand's _Inventing Niagara_, in part lives up to its blurbs. It is a decent history of the myths and history of the Falls and its surroundings (mostly on the American side) starting with the early French explorers.
I had hoped for a book about the Falls, particularly of the engineering that resculpted the Falls. By weight, it seems like the bulk of the book is about Strand's experience researching the book. Having recently read Tony Horwitz' books on early American history and on Cook's voyages, which follow a similar pattern of history and autobiography, I think I've become burned out on that style of writing.
If you are looking for a history of the Falls, there are a number of interesting nuggets here. But those looking purely for a book about history or engineering may wish to consult the author's souces at the back of the book instead.
Excellent Book June 4, 2008
3 out of 3 found this review helpful
As a Niagara Falls native, who has traveled all over the world and lived in several other parts of the country before returning to WNY, I found this book to be right on target. It was an engaging and easy read. Although I also thought I knew a lot about the history of the region, this wonderful book filled in a lot of blanks for me. It also made me remember the "good old days" when Niagara Falls was a destination to be enjoyed.
Very Enjoyable June 15, 2008
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
It was very enjoyable. Ginger Strand showed the very great diversity of history that constitutes the foundation of "present circumstances" at innumerable discernable geographic regions. This type of story is of value to many more people than just those who have lived there. I also thought that her presentation was well-balanced between facts, stories, and weirdness. I have already recommended her book to my day-job boss and one of my co-workers.
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