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Elixir spans five millennia, from ancient Mesopotamia to the parched present of the Sun Belt. As Brian Fagan shows, every human society has been shaped by its relationship toour most essential resource. Fagan’s sweeping narrative moves across the world, from ancient Greece and Rome, whose mighty aqueducts still supply modern cities, to China, where emperors marshaled armies of laborers in a centuries-long struggle to tame powerful rivers. He sets out three ages of water: In the first age, lasting thousands of years, water was scarce or at best unpredictable-so precious that it became sacred in almost every culture.
By the time of the Industrial Revolution, human ingenuity had made water flow even in the most arid landscapes.This was the second age: water was no longer a mystical force to be worshipped and husbanded, but a commodity to be exploited. The American desert glittered with swimming pools- with little regard for sustainability. Today, we are entering a third age of water: As the earth’s population approaches nine billion and ancient aquifers run dry,we will have to learn once again to show humility, even reverence, for this vital liquid. To solve the water crises of the future, we may need to adapt the water ethos of our ancestors.
Editorial Reviews
Five thousand years of rising and falling civilizations flow through Fagan’s sweeping survey of man’s ability to harness water. From the stirrings of agricultural settlements in the Euphrates Valley to the canny manipulation that sent the Owens River’s flow to a tiny California town called Los Angeles at the start of the 20th century, Fagan (The Great Warming), an archeologist, digs down into our relationship to water sources, pointing out that “water is capricious and powerful, far more masterful than the humans and animals that depend on it.” However, this survey veers unevenly, offering vivid descriptions of the hazards of channeling water in prehistoric northern Iraq, of water distribution in traditional Balinese governance structures, of Middle Eastern irrigation engineering that becomes mired in measurements and dimensions. Fagan prompts an appreciation of water’s centrality to civilization and of human ingenuity, but his topic is so broad and his treatment so dry that his conclusion—a call for a profound realignment of an increasingly urban world with its dwindling water supplies—lacks the impact it deserves. – Publishers Weekly
“At a time of increasing threats of regional ‘water wars,’ Elixir provides crucial temporal depth and worldwide scope to an emerging water scarcity crisis that we can no longer ignore. Fagan’s detailed examination of past use and abuse of water—highlighted by personal experience—makes his book not only a major source on the subject but, as usual, enjoyable reading.”—R. Gwinn Vivian, curator emeritus of archaeology, Arizona State Museum, author of The Chaco Handbook
“A comprehensive look at the history of water control… there are places on the earth today where our water control systems are breaking down, and most of us don’t yet recognize how devastating the effects of that will be. Elixir helps that realization… This book is one of the best pop science books I’ve read in a long time…there is much to reread and contemplate.”—About.com
Review
Brian Fagan has triumphed once again with his tracking of water use and practices over a long period of mankind. In Elixir, he has used his storytelling genius to tie the development of civilizations and empires far and wide to their water-use management, all in an enjoyable, interesting, and intellectual manner. For me, it will also serve as a reliable reference book for my paleohydrologic research on ancient peoples. It is a presentation of important aspects of world history using water as a common thread.
Fagan weaves together the three broad themes of gravity flow, the relationship of ritual use of water and water management, and the role of technology versus sustainability. Fagan’s message about living within one’s hydrological means is an important one.
Fagan’s success as a great storyteller has been proven with more than two dozen books that combine his detailed knowledge of anthropology with analysis of how and why things happened. He begins Chapter 2 by taking us back some 12,000 years to the Euphrates Valley, with his story of a young girl and her mother discovering the marvel of gravity flow of water, and then goes on to a delicate story of water use near Petra, at Wadi Faynan in southern Jordan.
I learned a lot from Fagan on the ancient Salt River water use in the Phoenix, Arizona area by the Hohokam people and how most of the remnants of their considerable irrigation works there have been lost to a sprawling metropolis.
Reading about the Nile and the Egyptian civilization that relied on this great river was enjoyable. Fagan also describes in detail how groundwater was captured and developed by the use of qanats. He presents details on how the qanats were built and operated, probably first by farmers in northwest Iran, and likely some 3,000 years ago.
Greek water history in Chapter 9 is laid out in terms of storm drainage, aqueducts, use of tunnels, and water-lifting devices along with their development and management of water from the earliest days to the time of Alexander the Great and then the Romans.
Fagan’s picture of Roman innovations using technology is fascinating and contains much detail, ranging from Pompeii to Tunisia, Libya, and Rome. His water-oriented description of Angkor Wat in Cambodia is special in many ways because the method of water management at this great temple complex has long been argued. Fagan tells the story of Angkor Wat water development and its use in clear, understandable language up until its collapse in 1431.
No story of water and humankind would be complete without including ancient China. Sure enough, Fagan includes China.
Elixer is a good book for all types of readers, including engineers, historians, anthropologists and high-schoolers. They will learn from a master how civilizations developed and how water made them happen. – Ken Wright, Amazon.Com Customer Review
Book review: ‘Elixir: A History of Water and Humankind’
The Chicago Tribune Book Review – August 18, 2011 (Excerpt)
It’s a typically Western irony that a well-researched and thoughtful book about water and its scarcity would be published during a spring that left every river from the Mississippi to the Colorado brimming, and water managers facing the unusual task of optimizing nature’s largess.
But Mark Twain had it right when he said climate is what you expect; weather is what you get. The West largely got strange weather this year. In its climatic history, the bulk of the West beyond the 100th meridian is constrained by aridity.
Into this volatile mix wades Brian Fagan, an anthropologist and archaeologist, with “Elixir: A History of Water and Humankind,” a work that juxtaposes ancient and contemporary cultures’ veneration of water with the current commodification of it, and finds the latter morally lacking and potentially self-destructive.
“We live in an industrial age of water as a commodity, yet alongside us thrive much smaller societies that use water wisely, as they always have,” writes Fagan. “History teaches us that the societies that last longest are those that treat water with respect, as an elixir of life, a gift from the gods. We seem to have forgotten this compelling lesson.” [Read the full article...]
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A Novel by John Patrick Doyle
A Peeping Tom Goes Nuts Over A Blind Girl
Paul Kirk is a librarian and one of his town’s quirkier residents. In a childhood home lacking parents (his mother dying of MS and his father an alcoholic) Paul had imagined himself a member of the neighboring family. Now in his late twenties, Paul vicariously participates in the households of his community. His peeping-Tom proclivities express his awkward need for social bonding.
Then Paul meets Bronwyn, a counselor who is lovely, independent and blind. She has inherited her Aunt Phyllis’ house and is newly arrived in town. When Paul first sees Bronwyn at church, he knows he wants to be part of her life. As the mystery of Aunt Phyllis unfolds, Bronwyn and Paul become more deeply involved as they learn about Phyllis’ secrets and how they relate to Bronwyn and her past, but Paul’s peeping ways may ruin it all. [Read more...]
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