Field Engineer's Manual Book

This is literally a 230-page book about an irrigation ditch, and by all the laws that govern such things, it should be boring as hell. But somehow it's not. I am so, so happy this book exists, and it makes me love Stanley Crawford even more that he would have thought this was a good idea.

These are the origins of modern political systems: delicate, elegant, flexible, elaborate, male-dominated ways of managing finite resources in which everyone has a stake. Mayordomo is incredibly insightful about what it takes to make those systems work in the face of variable weather and personalities. And they do work. Not perfectly, but with longevity. It's so difficult on the scale of a nation.

But there is no real clarion call to the modern age in these prose. The motion of water is the draw of the book. Stanley Crawford is like if Wendell Berry had decided he was not a prophet-farmer, he was just a farmer. Crawford is sensitive, observant, keenly alive to the people and the place, and also kind of resigned, as old farmers get to be sometimes. It's a voice that doesn't presume this valley has anything important to teach the wider world. It exists for itself.