The History of The Hudson River Valley: From the Civil War to Modern Times

For those, like me, who wish to learn more about the Hudson River Valley's early history, this is the book. Packed with excellent writing and details, this book allows one to see how the Hudson River Valley transformed itself from a backwater of the early Dutch empire to a bustling agricultural and trading part of the English colonies. Fascinating history.

I purchased this as a gift. The book is beautiful.

Well-written and researched, engrossing.

This book is packed with information but suffers from a serious lack of organization and discipline. Narratives are interrupted with digressions upon digressions, and main themes are often lost. It reads like a first draft that could have used the strong hand of an editor.It's a shame because Prof. Benjaim clearly knows his stuff and loves the subject matter. But it's more of a laundry list of facts than a coherent history n

All in all, this was a delightful, light-hearted book to read, not really a serious history of the Hudson River Valley, but instead, what could be called a delightful romp through some of the history of the Hudson River Valley from after the close of the Civil War until fairly modern times.One thing I learned from the book which I did not know before was that Bob Dylan, the singer/song writer, dumped his Triumph while riding through the Catskill Mountains somewhere, which caused him to suffer a mild concussion and some fractured vertebrae in his spine.And that is but one of the many anecdotes from the Woodstock area of New York state that we learn about while reading through this romp through history.And from that, we can see that the title is clearly misleading - this book, which is really literature, as opposed to a serious study of actual history, is really a series of snapshots that seem intended to be a praise fest for people in the lower Hudson Valley associated with art and music, so that it cannot in truth be called THE history, as much of that history is missing from the book, altogether, which is understandable if the author's purpose was to entertain, as opposed to educating.As history, it is either a snack or a light meal, and when one gets to the end, as I did, one has to wonder what it was really all about, and what was the point?Where the book fails as a serious history, in my estimation, being a student of that history, myself, is in the later chapters in Section VI, entitled "Modern Times."Here the author seems very timid with respect to the well-documented endemic corruption of the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation, which he briefly and barely touches on in chapter 40, "Deconstructing Indian Point," and chapter 43, "Saving Storm King."Given that the book is copyrighted in 2016, there are many curious omissions concerning the duplicitous conduct of the NYSDEC that the author touches on at p. 457, where he makes a brief mention of the state of New York's efforts to hide fish kills at the Indian Point nuclear plant on the lower Hudson River.One of those omissions, which one would have expected had this been a serious study of the subject, would have been a historic reversal by the NYSDEC in connection with a mining permit it had issued to Lane Construction Company to tear down Snake Mountain in the town of Nassau in Rensselaer County to convert it to crushed stone for building roads.What made this reversal historic was the fact that a citizen's group faced down the DEC and the experts for Lane in a series of hearings where the fact that the experts failed to take any kind of look at all at the impacts of this project on the environment and the community that relied on that environment for its survival, and the DEC merely rubber-stamped their proposal, in what became known as the DEC's "hardly look," as opposed to the "hard look" required by the state's State Environmental Quality Review Act law, which the author does touch on, although not in any kind of depth that would cause the casual reader with no background to really understand what this law was supposed to accomplish, but instead failed miserably at, due to the DEC duplicity which was exposed during the Lane hearings in the early part of this new century.Based on those hearings, which involved regular citizens, not the famous people mentioned in the book with respect to the Storm King fight, the DEC was forced to have to pull back the permit it had already issued to Lane, a decision subsequently upheld in court proceedings.It is perhaps the fact that no famous people from the lower Hudson Valley were involved in the Lane proceedings that resulted in their omission from this tome, but alas, we will never really know for certain.Another curious omission, which had serious ramifications only recently for children in the village of Hoosick Falls, New York, who were drinking water contaminated with PFOA, a carcinogen, as a result of negligence by the state of New York and the Rensselaer County Department of Health and the denial of honest services, was what was known in upstate politics as the "Dien Bien Phu" of public health in New York state, which matter was directly related to the ascension of then-federal 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals judge Sonia Sotomayor to a seat on the United States Supreme Court after Sotomayor in 2005 granted to the state of New York and the County of Rensselaer the "right" to retaliate against citizens investigating endemic public corruption in the state and county using fraudulently-issued NYS Mental Hygiene involuntary psychiatric commitment orders to have the state police capture the offender for transport to a secure psychiatric facility for incarceration, as if this were the Stalinist USSR with it Gulags where Soviet dissidents were incarcerated.It is because of these omissions that this book, although highly entertaining and fairly easy to read, will be doomed to the category of boutique history, as opposed to serious scholarship, and for future generations who might have been the beneficiaries of a more in-depth look at this sorry chapter in Hudson Valley history, that is a sad thing, indeed.