Sweet & Salt: Water and the Dutch

The book was much more than I expected! It is a beautiful book.

Haven't tead it yet. Looks immensely interesting.

This book is good, lavishly illustrated, well written. But read "The Dutch and their Delta: Living Below Sea Level"byJacob Vossesstein if you want a raw and intense, personal, heartfelt description and experience of it all. Although less fancy, it is a better book, I believe. No question the Dutch are the masters of dealing with water: will they be able to come up with ideas to defeat climate change? This book shows beautiful "concept images" of imagined and maybe realistic solutions.

This is a wonderful book that not only has amazing pictures - I love the cow standing in the flooded field on the cover -- it also shows how America and other countries can adapt to climate change and rising sea levels in new ways. Rather than just building massive barriers to keep out the sea, which the Dutch have done for centuries, they have now begun designing the country to let the sea in in a controlled manner. Tracy Metz tells how. It means new forms of dikes, new forms of building construction and new ways of forming. But it's ultimately a longer-term strategy that promises to keep this beautiful country around for many more centuries, even if the sea levels keep rising.

I was drawn to Sweet & Salt by the essays on historic and current Dutch art. The graphics are excellent, and Maartje van den Heuvel's texts are illuminating and rewarding, giving depth to Tracy Metz's essays on historical and contemporary politics, engineering, climatological and social issues in the Netherlands. A beautifully designed publication, it is very readable and provokes questions relating to all of us.