| Book Review | Environmental History, 10.4

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| Book Review | Environmental History, 10.4 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

BOOK REVIEW EDITOR'S NOTE

FOUR YEARS AGO, I agreed to serve as book review editor for three reasons: to serve the field I love; to help the field to grow; and to work with Adam Rome. It has been a pleasure doing all three. For this, my last issue, I have selected reviews that highlight a few of my favorite aspects of the job.

Astute readers will have noticed that reviews about global history and regions outside North America led off most issues over the past four years. Our field is becoming more international every year, and encouraging that trend was one of my priorities. A new feature designed to abet that process was the introduction of reviews of books written in languages other than English. This, my final issue as editor, puts an exclamation point on this international effort by including for the first time in a single issue (to my knowledge), reviews of books about all seven continents.

Environmental history is old enough to have a history. The time seemed ripe to introduce another new feature, retrospective reviews. Previous issues featured single reviewers' comments on classics. This issue adds a twist by including three reviews of a single book—Carolyn Merchant's Death of Nature. The reviews originated as papers in a panel organized by Jay Taylor at the 2005 meeting of the American Society for Environmental History.

No less pleasure came from seeing waves of new scholarship on the field's traditional strength, North America. Occasionally the timeliness of history is surpassing. This issue features a review of Craig Colten's history of New Orleans's relations with water. Written before Hurricane Katrina filled that "unnatural metropolis" (Colten's phrase) with water, the book reminds us of how deeply the roots of current environmental problems grow.

My job would have been impossible without help. We published several hundred reviews over the past four years. None of them would have appeared without scholars who took time from busy schedules to write the reviews. David Hsiung stepped in as acting book review editor while I was on sabbatical. Steve Anderson and Carol Marochak at the Forest History Society provided critical support. Eve Munson, the journal's managing editor, probably has gray hairs named for every issue's book review section. She amazed me with her unfailing kindness. Adam Rome was a model editor in chief and colleague. My gratitude goes to each and every one.

EDMUND RUSSELL

An Unnatural Metropolis: Wresting New Orleans from Nature. By Craig E. Colten. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2005. xiii + 245 pp. Illustrations, maps, notes, index. $39.95.. . .

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