Book Review

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Book Review | The Journal of American History, 86.4 | The History Cooperative

Bay Cities and Water Politics: The Battle for Resources in Boston and Oakland. By Sarah S. Elkind. (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1998. viii, 246 pp. $35.00, isbn 0-7006-0907-5.)

The growing sales of bottled water demonstrate Americans' distrust of the water flowing from their taps. Yet, as local citizens seek to clean up their polluted watersheds, they frequently are frustrated by government agencies that seem impervious to political influence. In this thoughtful and thorough study, the historian Sarah S. Elkind demonstrates that reformers deliberately created institutions characterized by "political isolation and narrow policy objectives." She shows how distinct water problems in two quite different cities, Gilded Age Boston and Progressive Era Oakland, produced a similar institution: the metropolitan special district. . . .

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