This week I finished:

Cadillac Desert: The American West And Its Disappearing Water, by Marc Reisner: A powerful book about how Manifest Destiny manifested in the American west. Diverting rivers and depleting aquifers created some of the biggest bureaucracies and, as the book puts it, the biggest socialist projects for people claiming to loathe socialism.

From this 2011 review from the Environmental Law Institute: “The year before Reisner’s untimely death at age 51, Cadillac Desert was 61st on a list of the 100 best nonfiction books in English in the 20th century, as compiled by a panel from the Modern Library, a division of Random House. It was a finalist for a National Book Critics’ Circle Award and inspired an award-winning documentary by the same name which was first broadcast in 1997.”

Reisner described California’s State Water Project as “one of the country’s foremost examples of socialism for the rich.”

What the book is about: population and the second law of thermodynamics. Driving everything in the book was population growth. The book never pointed out that as long as we take for granted that population must keep growing, we’ll keep pushing limits on nature until we break systems we need to survive and the population will decrease. Earth is big relative to a person, so we haven’t hit those limits yet globally.

As for the second law of thermodynamics, the book talks about how moving all that water around leads to evaporation, leaving behind salt. The book points out salt has contributed to empires and civilizations collapsing. They didn’t think they would. We don’t either.

I recommend this book.

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Building a StoryBrand: Clarify Your Message So Customers Will Listen Hardcover, by Donald Miller: I followed up his book Marketing Made Simple. Now that I’ve finished the core of my upcoming book, I know my audience, its needs, my message to it, and what I offer. Time to package and deliver it effectively.

I’ve read many ways to put the hero’s journey into practice. Maybe I’ve heard it enough times that this time it clicked more than before, maybe experience has helped me clarify it. I’m inclined to think Miller packaged it most effectively.

If you plan to market online, I recommend these two books.

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