Review of Water Resources Management by David Stephenson

The author, a faculty member at the University of the Witwatersrand in South Africa, applied his experience in teaching and consulting to produce a text that he hopes will enable an engineering or science graduate to learn the techniques for managing water and hydraulic structures without taking advanced courses in hydrology or water engineering. At first inspection, the book’s coverage seems to be fairly comprehensive. It includes 13 chapters, which are a mixture of water management applications ~assessment!, resource topics ~groundwater!, methods ~computer modeling!, and infrastructure ~hydraulic structures!. The author has a much-needed chapter on drought but did not include one on water law, a key topic that will be missed in the book. Other important management topics such as finance and data management are covered only briefly if at all. Although the book’s title includes the word ‘‘management,’’ an examination of the coverage of individual topics suggests that the author is mostly writing about technical methods, and does not include much on management tasks. For example, in the chapter on drought management, no mention is made of drought indices or drought contingency planning, two of the most important topics of managing water during drought emergencies. In a similar way, the chapter on flood management includes several interest-