From the Washington Post:
“This book documents an obsession,” writes Ginger Strand in her entertaining study of the exploitation of Niagara Falls, both town and waterfall. Niagara’s history, she claims, is fraught with “falsification, prevarication and omission.” In Inventing Niagara, she sets out on a quest to cut through the cultural accretions of centuries and find the fundamental truth about Niagara.
At its most basic, Niagara Falls is a big, green waterfall that straddles the border between the United States and Canada on the strait that links Lake Erie and Lake Ontario. But over time, Niagara has also become a place of kitschy tourism, daredevil stunts, gambling and large-scale industrial development which all too quickly turned into environmental disaster. The waterfall itself has been propped up and rejiggered by feats of engineering in an attempt to prevent it from crumbling under the force of its own water and to maintain its scenic impact despite the diversion of as much as three-quarters of its water to produce electricity.