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In Praise of Floods
The Untamed River and the Life It Brings
Series: Yale Agrarian Studies Series
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Brief Description
James C. Scott reframes rivers as alive and dynamic, revealing the consequences of treating them as resources for our profit. A New Yorker Best Book of the Year "Informative, enjoyable, and provocative. . . . Scott's [prose] is dry, clear, and scalding with moral purpose." -...
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In Praise of Floods
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Description
James C. Scott reframes rivers as alive and dynamic, revealing the consequences of treating them as resources for our profit.
A New Yorker Best Book of the Year
"Informative, enjoyable, and provocative. . . . Scott's [prose] is dry, clear, and scalding with moral purpose." - Becca Rothfeld, Washington Post
In Praise of Floods presents rivers, on a long view, as alive. They are born; they change; they shift their channels; they forge new routes to the sea; they move both gradually and violently; they can teem (usually) with life; they may die a quasi-natural death; they are frequently maimed and even murdered.
It is the annual flood pulse—the brief time when the river occupies the floodplain—that gives a river its vitality, but it is human engineering that kills it, suppressing the flood pulse with dams, irrigation, siltation, dikes, and levees. In demonstrating these threats to the riverine world, award-winning author James C. Scott examines the life history of a particular river, the Ayeyarwady (Irrawaddy) of Burma, the heartland and superhighway of Burman culture.
Scott opens our understanding of rivers to encompass their entirety—tributaries, wetlands, floodplains, backwaters, eddies, periodic marshlands, and the assemblage of life forms dependent on rivers for their existence and well-being. For anyone interested in the Anthropocene and the Great Acceleration, rivers offer a striking example of the consequences of human intervention in trying to control and domesticate a natural process, the complexity and variability of which we barely understand.
Series: Yale Agrarian Studies Series
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Book Details
INFORMATION
ISBN: 9780300292305
Publisher: Yale University Press
Format: Paperback / softback
Date Published: 05 May 2026
Country: United States
Imprint: Yale University Press
Illustration: 48 b-w illus.
Audience: General / adult
DIMENSIONS
Width: 140.0mm
Height: 216.0mm
Weight: 250g
Pages: 248
About the Author
James C. Scott (1936–2024) was Sterling Professor of Political Science and Professor of Anthropology Emeritus at Yale University. His many books include The Art of Not Being Governed, Seeing Like a State, Domination and the Arts of Resistance, and Against the Grain.
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