Luc Sante was born in Verviers, Belgium, and is the author of six books, his first being Low Life (FSG, 1991). Sante's other books include Evidence, The Factory of Facts, Kill All Your Darlings, The Other Paris, Folk Photography, and, most recently, Maybe the People Would Be the Times. He is the recipient of a Whiting Award, Guggenheim and Cullman fellowships, an Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, a Grammy (for album notes), and an Infinity Award for Writing from the International Center of Photography. Tim Davis studied photography at Bard College, graduating in 1991. His work is in the collections of the Guggenheim, Whitney, Brooklyn, and Metropolitan Museums in New York; the Milwaukee Museum of Art; the High Museum of Art, Atlanta; the Baltimore Museum; the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC; and numerous others.
The prose is crystalline and the pages are richly illuminated with maps, adverts, and period photography... The visual matter serves to further accentuate the intractable issue at the heart of this book: how to help an urban population without utterly destroying a rural one. --The Chicago Reader [A] rewarding study [of] the history of New York City's reservoirs and the displacement that followed the city's increasing demand for water . . . well-crafted prose, rich archival illustrations, and eye-catching photographs of the reservoirs make this memorable. The chronicle is anything but dry. --Publishers Weekly