Sweet & Salt: Water and the Dutch

I confess that I did not read the entire book, but I leafed through it many times and read the first two chapters. It is a fascinating and beautiful book about the fraught relationship of the Dutch to the water that surrounds them; about the battle to hold back the sea from land wanted for conventional farming, but also to make use of the sea; about the importance of the sea to the Dutch financially as well as culturally; and about new efforts to work differently with the sea in light of rising sea levels due to climate change. There are pages and pages of photographs of water works, art installations, cultural events, and plans for water projects that have not been built, as well as reproductions of works of art that illustrate the place of water in Dutch culture, from paintings of storm tossed boats at sea representing hard times in human life to paintings commemorating famous floods in Dutch history, to more contemporary representations of human life alongside water.

I borrowed this from a library and I'm sad that I have to return it without being able to spend more time with it. It's a book to savour.