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Review CopyAs the author points out, "Several themes run through The Norton Trilogy: the most important is the interplay between human values and the waterscape. Technology, of course, played a monumental role in this drama, for dynamite, bulldozers, and reinforced concrete impacted the region's water and shaped the agricultural economy more than any Indian's digging stick. Another theme is the central role played by government--local, state, regional, and national--in shaping water policies. The biographical profiles of each John Norton addressed in this work reveal much about the history of Arizona and the central role that the quest for water has played in the growth and development of the region."
Although the book focuses largely on the state of Arizona, and specifically on one Arizonan family, the story is a template of the hardworking American ideal. Senator John Kyl, a colleague of John Norton III, writes in the foreword, “The Nortons, who never suffered from lack of a work ethic, have made Arizona and the nation a better place. This book is as much an American story as it is an Arizona one.” Readers everywhere will be captivated by the generation-to-generation struggles of a family business and how these failures and successes are affected by interstate politics and public policy.
DR. JACK L. AUGUST, JR. serves as executive director of the Arizona Historical Foundation at Arizona State University, where he teaches graduate courses in water policy and management. He has taught at several institutions, including the University of Houston, the University of Northern British Columbia, and Northern Arizona University. He was a Pulitzer Prize nominee for his volume Vision in the Desert: Carl Hayden and Hydropolitics in the American Southwest (Fort Worth: TCU Press, 1999); coauthor with former Arizona Senator Dennis DeConcini of Senator Dennis Deconcini: From the Center of the Aisle (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2006); and author of Dividing Western Waters: Mark Wilmer and Arizona v California (Fort Worth: TCU Press, 2007).