The Most Dammed Country in the World, by Dai Qing

I expect you already know which country is being referred to in the title of this book. It’s China, which has 23,841 large dams. That’s comfortably over twice the number of dams in the US in second place. Among them is the largest dam in the world, the Three Gorges Dam, also the world’s largest power station and by any account one of the most impressive feats of engineering in human history.

The dam has saved hundreds of millions of tonnes of coal and its associated emissions, but it was...