Fixing Niagara Falls

Mark Sholdice, King’s University College at Western University:

"… Macfarlane’s great contribution is to provide a comprehensive account of the creation of the engineering complex at Niagara Falls…"

Clarence Hatton-Proulx:
Fixing Niagara Falls is an excellent monograph that cleverly analyzes how engineering interventions and human hubris helped make the Niagara Falls that we are familiar with today.

A.M. Strauss, Vanderbilt University:

Historians and general readers interested in the Falls and in issues connected with the associated technological and political background will appreciate this work.

Donald C. Jackson, Lafayette College:
Macfarlane has crafted an exemplary work of scholarship.

From the Foreword by Graeme Wynn, professor emeritus, Department of Geography, University of British Columbia:
In Fixing Niagara Falls we find Niagara serially harnessed, saved, negotiated, empowered, disguised, preserved, and fabricated. Through these pages we come to understand the Falls as an extremely complex, ever-changing entity.

James Murton, associate professor, Department of History, Nipissing University:
Daniel Macfarlane has surely read most – if not all – relevant books on Niagara Falls in his research for this truly cross-border history of one of the most important natural sites in North America.

Kurk Dorsey, professor, Department of History, University of New Hampshire:
Fixing Niagara Falls is unlike any other book that I know of, framing the Niagara landscape as an example of the “technological sublime” devoted both to beauty and power.

Nancy Langston, professor of environmental history, Department of Social Sciences, Michigan Technological University:
How do you write an original book about Niagara Falls, when so many excellent books about the Falls have already been written? Macfarlane shows it’s possible. In this fascinating and well-crafted study, Macfarlane weaves together energy histories, toxic histories, and cultural readings in his analysis, while foregrounding the waterfall itself. He shows that Niagara Falls today is a mesmerizing mixture of nature and culture, radically re-made in service of industrial capitalism. This is truly a transboundary analysis, paying close attention to evolving ideas about the public good and the role of nature in industrial North America.

Dan Egan, author of The Death and Life of the Great Lakes:
Once an icon of untrammelled wilderness and inexhaustible natural resources, over the past two centuries Niagara Falls has been harnessed for hydropower to the point that today it is a roaring paradox – a man-made natural wonder, an amusement park for nature seekers. Yet the Falls are still worth visiting because they are still one-of-a-kind spectacular, and so is Daniel Macfarlane’s (not-so-natural) history of how it all happened.

Bill McKibben, author of Falter: Has the Human Game Begun to Play Itself Out?:
I've always loved Niagara Falls – it is sublime. And no less so, I think, once you read this book and understand how it came to be. It speaks of nature's power but also of a dozen epochs and the ideas of the people who shifted and shaped it over the last centuries. This is engaged and engaging history.