Last year ''Cadillac Desert'' was 61st on a list selected by a panel from the Modern Library, a division of Random House, of the 100 best nonfiction books written in English during the 20th century. Reisner published yesterday, The San Francisco Chronicle called it ''an angry indictment of water depletion in the American West'' and ''the seminal text on the West's perennial water wars.'' The book spurred efforts to make reforms in water policy, and it is still highly regarded. Reisner also ''recounts how huge sums have been spent to benefit small numbers of influential people and suggests painful days of reckoning lie ahead,'' Mr. ''He details the Machiavellian competition,'' he continued, between the Interior Department's Bureau of Reclamation and the Army Corps of Engineers. Reisner, a former staff writer for the Natural Resources Defense Council, ''has put the story together in trenchant form,'' Mr. ''The money has gone into federal water projects in the Western states, - some of the projects awesome, some scandalous but all with an uncertain future,'' Mr. ''It's a revealing, absorbing, often amusing and alarming report on where billions of their dollars have gone - and where a lot more are going. ''It's unlikely that most taxpayers will read 'Cadillac Desert,' but they should,'' Mr.
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