Praise for A River Lost

“Since I moved to the Pacific Northwest a few months ago, I’ve read a dozen books about the region. Blaine Harden’s A River Lost . . . struck me as the truest and taught me the most, maybe because it’s the most personal and hardheaded. . . . He has a native son’s feel for its people. . . . His writing is graceful, affecting, and spiced with wry humor.”

—Joe Kane, Village Voice

“Records in fascinating detail how the well-being of those who live off the Columbia’s largesse was purchased with billions of federal dollars and how one of the West’s most majestic rivers was sacrificed to economic advance.”

—The Economist Review

“Harden’s acidly ironic primer about ‘the West’s most thoroughly conquered river’ is as enjoyable as it is enraging. . . . [A] frank look at a great river’s woes.”

—Christopher Solomon, Seattle Times

“A hard-nosed, clear-eyed, tough-minded dispatch on the sort of contentious subject that is almost always distorted by ideology or obscured by a fog of sentiment.”

—Hal Espen, New York Times Book Review

“Harden’s research is admirably thorough. . . . A cautionary study of the cultural and environmental price too often paid for progress.”

—Booklist

“[Harden] examines the changes—sociological, environmental, economic and aesthetic—that the taming of this great river wrought. [A] wonderful account. . . . A sensitive and thoughtful examination of a complex situation.”

—Publishers Weekly