Story That Stands Like a Dam: Glen Canyon and the Struggle for the Soul of the West

Martin provides a thorough history of events leading up to the dam's construction as well as the history of that construction. It's well researched, and does not grind environmental or other axes, so will be good reading for people who bring a variety of viewpoints to the question of whether Glen Canyon deserves a doff of the hat or some dynamite from Hayduke.

This book is absolutely loaded with information on Glen Canyon, Glen Canyon Dam, Lake Powell, and Page, Arizona--the nearby town of dambuilders. Its author has tried incredibly hard, and succeeded, at writing a book that is unbelievably fair, and that presents the controversial story of the building of Glen Canyon Dam in as truthful and as unbiased a light as possible. Russell Martin, the book's author, doesn't even mention (until the book's end) whether the book's main characters--the dambuilders and the conservationists--are republicans or democrats; this allows those characters to escape the stigma those labels would bring, and allows the reader to consider the characters just on what they did and what they said, and not instantly dismiss them because they're political parties may not be our own. This book is beautifully researched, written as a gripping narrative, and well-worth reading--though I have to add that it's so full of information that about three-quarters of the way through the book I experienced a brief feeling of being absolutely glutted on facts about the subject. This is an excellent book though, and I would recommend it (along with Jared Farmer's "Glen Canyon Dammed") to anyone interested in the subject of this controversy.

Martin's book is a good rendering of the planning, construction, completion, and opposition to the Glen Canyon Dam. The book is a good historical work, though I didn't find it a compelling read, like "Cadillac Desert". Martin's best prose is when he descibes life in the town of Page during the construction of the dam, with rich details about life in a government town in the middle of the desert. Very enjoyable read even if you wish Glen Canyon Dam would fall back into the canyon. Can make you appreciate fully the people who built it and the people who opposed it.

THIS is a thoroughly gripping history of a great and fantastically beautiful river of the American Southwest, and of the powerful human beings locked in a bitter struggle over it, all their massive efforts to control it and equally determined efforts of those who did not want it controlled. Its climax is the completion of the monumental Glen Canyon Dam and the creation of Lake Powell, with a water storage capacity of 27 MILLION acre feet an a power-generating capacity to supply the needs of vast numbers of people and businesses over a vast range of our country. It is wrong to sugests that there are any villians in the story, but clearly, there are many heroic figures in a collosal struggle of competing interests, from the Sierra Club's David Brower, conservationist turned environmentalist, to the Bureau of Reclamation's Floyd Dominy, to prime contractor Merritt, Chapman Scott's chief engineer, Lem Wylie who got the job done despite the fact that the corporation went belly-up at the end. And it has politicians and statesmen-politicians from Colorado's Wayne Aspinall to Arizona's Stewart Udall and Barry Goldwater. Even Holywood with Charlton Heston and John Wayne, mercifully in bit sub-plots, grace a page or two. Every person even remotely interested in the history of our country's development and the beauty of the place it unfolded, should read Russell Martin's, "The Story That Stands Like a Dam."