If I could give it 3 1/2 stars, I would.

books:


	• The Glen Canyon Reader Mathew Barrett Gross University of Arizona Press, 2003 - 201 pages average customer review:based on 2 reviews view larger image
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Interesting, but not compelling

Got this book in advance of visiting area. While it had some good sections, it was very specific to dam/activities surrounding it. Good, but not great, book

If I could give it 3 1/2 stars, I would.

I have read probably over fifty books about Glen Canyon, Lake Powell, and the San Juan, Escalante, and Colorado Rivers, not to mention countless articles, all while researching a book about Lake Powell of my own.

That said, "The Glen Canyon Reader" offers a nice assortment of selections from many of those books, and a few articles and excerpts from books and magazines that are usually much harder to find. I would recommend it to anyone looking to get a rough overview of Glen Canyon history. The book's selections by Edward Abbey, Bruce Berger, and Jared Farmer, are terrific, especially the article by Jared Farmer (author of "Glen Canyon Dammed").

While reading Jared Farmer's article, a line from "The Great Gatsby" kept flitting through my head: "You're worth the whole damn bunch of them put together." His almost shouldn't have been included, because it made most of the others seem inferior. In contrast to his, the historical excerpts from John Wesley Powell and from Escalante & Dominguez seemed dustier and more stale, the magazine articles seemed triter, and Katie Lee's book excerpt seemed even more crazed and poorly written that it would have seemed normally.

Katie Lee's excerpt is a main reason I haven't rated this book higher. I just really don't like her writing, or her insanely political, idealizing, villainizing stance. I think her presence is a much bigger detriment to the case against Glen Canyon Dam that it is a help. Female folksingers are annoying. Poll America, and I'm sure the majority will agree with me. Katie Lee is like a Joan Baez singing awful rhymes about the Colorado River swishing between her legs; her poetry is awful; her cutesy sayings about the "Bureau of Wreck-the-Nation" are just not funny. Skip her excerpt, and you're reading a solid, four star book.

The book is not a bad overview, though. I really did enjoy it. I do wish it had at least a single excerpt from the writings or oral history of some of of the Native Americans in the area though, and I think the editor could have done more to find another piece or two representing modern-day Glen Canyon, a.k.a. Lake Powell.

Despite having read a lot on this subject the last few years, I did learn things from this book. It contains Floyd Dominy's out of print booklet "Lake Powell: Jewel of the Colorado," it has clues to the Everett Ruess mystery I haven't read elsewhere, and it features several stories of animals trapped by the rising waters of Lake Powell that were completely new to me. If you're passionate about this subject, absolutely, get this book. You'll almost certainly learn something new.

And, if you know nothing about this subject, this really wouldn't be a bad place to start.

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Stretching for 170 miles across northern Arizona and southern Utah, Lake Powell is both a vacationer's paradise and the second-largest reservoir in the Western Hemisphere. Yet few visitors to the lake today are aware of the lost world that lies beneath its crystal waters. Once an enchanted landscape of sandstone cliffs and secret crevices, Glen Canyon has been but a memory since the damming of the Colorado River near Page, Arizona, in 1963. Often called "the place no one knew," Glen Canyon was in fact explored by thousands of visitors?including dozens of writers?before the dam's completion. River runner Mathew Gross has combed the literature of Glen Canyon to assemble this wide-ranging look at the history of this now-submerged natural treasure, the first book to bring together these voices of remembrance. Beginning with the first known written report of Glen Canyon in an eighteenth-century missionary journal, Gross has selected accounts of the canyon from both before and after the dam. Included are some of the West's best-known writers?Zane Grey and Katie Lee, Edward Abbey and Ellen Meloy?as well as Pulitzer Prize winners John McPhee and Wallace Stegner. Other authors range from David Brower, director of the Sierra Club when the dam was built, to Floyd Dominy, the federal bureaucrat responsible for the dam. The Glen Canyon Reader is a book that may be read straight through as entertaining and informative history. But as Gross suggests, "Perhaps more pleasurable is to flip through these pages, to poke around and explore, as one would have done in Glen Canyon . . . to visit and revisit the places contained in this book, these cool glens and embracing alcoves and hidden grottos, these canyons and dreams and ghosts that will always, always be with us."

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