New York Times Book Review: Egan's Great Lakes book 'deeply researched and sharply written'

Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

Dan Egan's recently published book about the future of the Great Lakes is called "deeply researched and sharply written" by the New York Times Book Review.

The Death and Life of the Great Lakes. By Dan Egan. W.W. Norton. 384 pages. $27.95.

The lengthy review of Egan's book, "The Death and Life of the Great Lakes," will appear in Sunday's Book Review and is online now. Egan is a Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reporter and two-time Pulitzer Prize finalist.

Written by author and writer Robert Moor, the review carries the headline "Nor Any Drop to Drink?: Why the Great Lakes Face a Murky Future." It compares Egan's book to Rachel Carson's "Silent Spring," which Moor calls a "classic of red-flag-raising eco-journalism."

Egan "nimbly splices together history, science, reporting and personal experiences into a taut and cautiously hopeful narrative," the review says.

The book notes that the striking clarity of the Lake Michigan water masks deep trouble facing the Great Lakes, Moor writes.

"I learned that the reason the lake had become so clear was that it had been invaded by a dastardly pair of bivalves — the zebra and quagga mussels — which had hitched a ride on a shipping barge from either the Black or Caspian Seas and then quietly but ceaselessly colonized the lake," Moor says.

"The water is now three times clearer than it was in the 1980s. But 'this is not the sign of a healthy lake,' Egan warns. 'It’s the sign of a lake having the life sucked out of it.' "

Egan won an AAAS Kavli Science Journalism Award in 2013, the Oakes Award for environmental journalism in 2006, and has received four National Headliner Awards for environmental and science reporting. He investigated threats to the Great Lakes and the effectiveness of government efforts to protect them during a nine-month O'Brien Fellowship in Public Service Journalism through the Diederich College of Communication at Marquette University.

"The Death and Life of the Great Lakes" was published earlier this year by W.W. Norton & Co.

RELATED: Great Lakes coverage