Zero Tolerance

by Thomas Richards

November 1973. The war in Vietnam is already lost. The United States decides to send the Bureau of Reclamation to build a dam on the Mekong River near a village called Da Trinh Sanh. The dam will divert the river from the rice basket of Asia, the Mekong Delta, and destroy the country. It is the biggest operation of the war and the largest public-works project ever. Twenty years later, four people are trying to put together what happened. Why did the dam fail? How close did they come to destroying Vietnam? They were all there, but they all remember different things. One was on a gunboat on the river, one was an engineer on the dam, one was a biologist in Saigon, one was a photographer in the field. None of them can quite tell the whole story.
Zero Tolerance is the story of their contact with the Bureau of Reclamation, which is not merely a government operation but an agency for turning America into a country of diverted rivers, a nation moving against nature itself. An inventive first novel about the psychology of obsession, in which the environment becomes an instrument of war and technology the most dangerous weapon of all, Zero Tolerance marks an astonishing debut.

245 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1997

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