Marc Reisner's 1986 history of water and political power in the American West is the foundational book on the subject and remains startlingly current. Reisner traces how a region whose natural rainfall would support only a tiny fraction of its current population was transformed by the most ambitious public works program in human history: the construction of dams, aqueducts, and irrigation projects by the Bureau of Reclamation and the Army Corps of Engineers from the late nineteenth century through the 1980s. He tells the story through battles over the Colorado, Columbia, Sacramento, and Missouri rivers, and through portraits of the engineers and politicians—William Mulholland, Floyd Dominy, John Wesley Powell, Carl Hayden, and many others—whose ambitions and rivalries shaped the system. Reisner argues that the plumbing built to make the West habitable was driven less by genuine economic need than by congressional logrolling, agricultural lobbies, and bureaucratic empire-building, and that the resulting system is fundamentally unsustainable—based on overestimates of how much water actually flows, on aquifers that are being mined faster than they can recharge, and on engineering that no one would build today. The book reads as well-paced narrative history and has become indispensable for understanding the megadrought, urban water politics, and the politics of climate adaptation in the West.