Overview

Americans call Niagara Falls a natural wonder, but the falls aren't very natural anymore. In fact, they are a study in artifice. Water diverted, riverbed reshaped, brink stabilized, and landscape redesigned, the falls are more a monument to man's meddling than to nature's strength. Held up as an example of something real, they are hemmed in with fakery--waxworks, haunted houses, IMAX films, and ersatz Indian tales. A symbol of American manifest destiny, they are shared politely with Canada. Emblematic of nature's power, they are completely human-controlled. An archetype of natural beauty, the falls belie an ugly environmental legacy still bubbling up from below. On every level, Niagara Falls is a monument to how America falsifies nature, reshaping its contours and redirecting its force while claiming to submit to its will. Combining history, reportage, and personal narrative, Inventing Niagara traces Niagara's journey from sublime icon to engineering marvel to camp spectacle. Along the way, Ginger Strand uncovers the hidden history of America's waterfall: the Mohawk chief who wrested the falls from his adopted tribe, the revered town father who secretly assisted slave catchers, the wartime workers who unknowingly helped build the atomic bomb, and the building contractor who bought and sold a pharaoh. With an uncanny ability to zero in on the buried truth, Strand introduces us to underwater dams, freaks of nature, mythical maidens, and 280,000 radioactive mice buried at Niagara. From LaSalle to Lincoln to Los Alamos, Mohawks to Marilyn, Niagara's story is America's story, a tale of dreams founded on the mastery of nature. At a time of increasing environmental crisis, Inventing Niagara shows us how understanding the cultural history of nature might help us to rethink our place in it today.

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Reviews

The text is playful, and narrator Karen White is well tuned to Strand's approach.-- AudioFile Strand's provocative and iconoclastic book says much about how America has dominated nature, despoiled it and shrouded the offense in myth. -- Publishers Weekly The text is playful, and narrator Karen White is well tuned to Strand's approach. -- AudioFile

Author Information

"Ginger Strand grew up in Texas, Missouri, Illinois, Wisconsin, and Michigan, but mostly on a farm in Michigan. The author of the novel Flight, she has published essays and fiction in many places, including Harper's, the Believer, the Iowa Review, the Gettysburg Review, Swink, Raritan, the New England Review, and Orion, where she is a contributing editor. A former fellow in the Behrman Center for the Humanities at Princeton University, she has received residency grants from the MacDowell Colony, Yaddo, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and the American Antiquarian Society, as well as a Tennessee Williams scholarship in fiction from the Sewanee Writers' Conference. She lives in New York City. Karen White is a New York Times and USA Today bestselling author of twenty-five novels, including Dreams of Falling and The Night the Lights Went Out. She currently writes what she refers to as ""grit lit""--Southern women's fiction--and has also expanded her horizons into writing a mystery series set in Charleston, South Carolina. She is a graduate of the American School in London and has a BS in management from Tulane University. When not writing, she spends her time reading, singing, and avoiding cooking. She has two grown children and currently lives near Atlanta, Georgia, with her husband and two spoiled Havanese dogs."

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