Deep Water

"In Deep Water, Jacques Leslie dramatizes the effects of dams to tell the story of globalization and the world we live in. In the great tradition of long-form reportage, he went afield with three experts on dams: Medha Patkar, a charismatic Indian activist who has fought against the completion of a giant dam in India by chaining herself to it each year as the water rises, threatening to let herself be drowned unless construction is ceased; a Berkeley professor named Thayer Scudder, who has spent his career studying the effects of dams in Africa on the tribal people they've displaced; and Don Blackmore, a man whose unenviable job is to persuade Australian farmers to release water they've diverted from the Murray River for personal use, in order to prevent a major drought in an area Australians fancy as the next California." "In each of these portraits, Leslie brings into sharp focus the political, social, economic, and environmental issues to which dams give rise."--BOOK JACKET.

Beyond its central premise, the book can be read through the connected lenses of Nonfiction. Those themes offer useful points of attention as the characters, ideas, or world develop, especially where the book complicates the expectations of its primary category.