Download Inventing Niagara: Beauty, Power, and Lies AudioBook Free
People in america call Niagara Falls a natural wonder, but the falls aren't very natural ever again. In fact, they may be a report in artifice. Water diverted, riverbed reshaped, brink stabilized, and scenery redesigned, the falls are usually more a monument to man's meddling than to nature's strength. Held up for example of something real, they may be hemmed along with fakery-waxworks, haunted houses, IMAX movies, and ersatz Indian tales. Symbolic of American express destiny, they may be shared politely with Canada. Emblematic of nature's vitality, they may be completely human-controlled. An archetype of natural splendor, the falls belie an unsightly environmental legacy still bubbling up from below. On every level, Niagara Falls is a monument to how America falsifies character, reshaping its curves and redirecting its force while boasting to post to its will.Combining record, reportage, and personal narrative, Inventing Niagara traces Niagara's quest from sublime icon to anatomist marvel to camp spectacle. Along the way, Ginger Strand uncovers the invisible record of America's waterfall: the Mohawk main who wrested the falls from his used tribe, the revered town daddy who secretly assisted slave catchers, the wartime employees who unknowingly helped build the atomic bomb, and the building service provider who bought and sold a pharaoh. With an uncanny capacity to zero in on the buried real truth, Strand presents us to underwater dams, freaks of character, 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, an account of dreams founded on the mastery of character. At the same time of increasing environmental turmoil, Inventing Niagara shows us how understanding the ethnic history of character might help us to rethink our place in it today.
