Sneddon "Concrete Revolution" review in "Nature"

Concrete Revolution: Large Dams, Cold War Geopolitics, and the US Bureau of Reclamation

Christopher Sneddon, University of Chicago Press (2015), ISBN: 9780226284316

In this stellar history, geographer Christopher Sneddon traces the twentieth-century boom that saw 50,000 big dams built worldwide. The US Bureau of Reclamation presided, from the Great Depression megaproject Hoover Dam to the cold-war export of bureau engineers to more than 100 countries. Yet by 1969, assistant commissioner Gilbert Stamm saw that doing “marvellous things with materials” does not necessarily meet human needs. Societies and rivers, Sneddon shows, make for a complex confluence.

See "Nature: International Weekly Journal of Science" at http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v527/n7577/full/527163a.html.