Todd M. Kerstetter, "Flood on the Tracks: Living, Dying, and the Nature of Disaster in the Elkhorn River Basin" (Texas Tech UP, 2019)

New Books in American Studies · Jul 9, 2021 · 1h

If floods are inevitable, why do humans insist on building alongside riverbanks? Todd Kerstetter, professor of history at Texas Christian University, tries to answer that question in Flood on the Tracks: Living, Dying, and the Nature of Disaster in the Elkhorn River Basin (Texas Tech University Press, 2019). Kerstetter examines a relatively small river system, the Elkhorn River basin in Nebraska, and describes the waterway's deep history. Floods happen for explicable reasons, and while humans have used the Elkhorn for thousands of years, different societies have found different approaches to…