The Taking of the Waters

by John Shannon

No Synopsis Available.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0963905015
• ISBN13: 9780963905017
• Release Date: January 1994
• Publisher: John Brown Books
• Length: 403 Pages
• Weight: 1.25 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.1" x 5.4" x 8.5"

Customer Reviews

an unsung major novel

The Publisher's Weekly review above is wrong. Shannon's prose doesn't lumber, nor are his characters unsympathetic. Nor is "The Taking of the Waters" an inefficient piece of storytelling. Through the use of the German narrator, Dieter Sachs, who has a fresh, outsider's perspective on America, Shannon deftly strings together the story of his three generations of left-wing activists. Maxi Trumbull joins the doomed fight by Owens Valley residents to prevent the theft of their water by the city of Los Angeles; her son, Slim, leads auto workers in a lightly fictionalized account of the successful Flint, Mich., sit-down strike against General Motors, only to be driven underground by post-World War II anti-Communism. Then Slim learns, via Khrushchev's 1956 speech about Stalin's crimes, that something is fatally wrong with the doctrine to which he has devoted his life. How can he disown the doctrine without also disowning his positive achievements? This question torments his later years. In the subsequent wreckage of the American Left, his son, Clay, flounders; the country is moving rightward and working people are losing many of their hard-won gains, but there is no longer any viable ideology to check the excesses of capitalism. Hardly anywhere else in American literature has the channeling of so much idealism into a dead end, and the practical consequences of this defeat(which economist Paul Krugman describes in "The Great Awakening": growing economic equality in America from 1940 to 1970, growing inequality ever since), been explored in such human, dramatic terms. In a juster world, this book would be read as widely as Dan Brown's mumbo-jumbo about the Holy Grail or Tim LaHaye's apocalyptic fantasies. If that's too much to ask, at the very least it should be rescued from obscurity and honored. It's literary and intelligent and thought-provoking on every page. Those "unsympathetic" characters will linger in your minds. Don't be put off by the idea of reading about old-time Reds, or by the ironic, existentialist flavor that Dieter brings to the story. This is a major American novel.