The Delaware River flows out of New York's Catskill Mountains and winds
its way through woodland and rural farmland, through the great Water Gap
ravine, and finally past one of the world's most industrialized
riverfronts. Yet it remains one of the country's last undammed rivers,
with a natural life as rich and varied as its human history.
In Natural Lives, Modern Times, Bruce Stutz has written a thoroughly
modern natural history, blending keen observations of the nature of the
Delaware's enduring complex of river, glacial streams, marshlands, and
forest with glimpses of history and folklore and with luminous portraits
of those whose lives are sustained by the river. The Delaware was the
waterway of the nation's first mercantile, philosophical, scientific,
cultural, and industrial heartland, hosting immigrants from Europe,
Africa, and the Mediterranean, all looking for new lives along the
ancient river.
In this always entertaining and often haunting intertwining of human and
natural history, Bruce Stutz discovers those who regret what has been
lost and those passionate about preserving what remains. Most of all,
however, he lets us see what's at stake in a wonderfully diverse world.
Not since Mark Twain has anyone taken such a freewheeling river journey.