It sounds like a naturalized urban legend, but the rumor holds water: Niagara Falls is turned up for the tourists. At night, and during the ­off-­season, much of its flow is diverted into turbines for peak power gener­ation. When Ginger Strand, an environmental writer from New York City, discovered this fact while taking notes on a foray to the falls, she “stopped scribbling and just grinned like a maniacal toddler.” It is the starting point for 

, a picaresque journey that explains how just about everything at Niagara Falls is engineered, Disneyfied, or ­deluded.

The 176-foot drop in the Niagara River between Lakes Erie and Ontario, on the border between Ontario and New York, is neither the largest nor the tallest cataract in the world. But it does occupy an outsized place in American mythology, sitting at the frontier of a young country just venturing into tourism. As Strand sees it, that virginal experience went horribly awry. Goat Island, a wooded hunk of rock in the middle of the river, became a staging area for parking lots. The Cave of the Winds, a natural cave behind the falls, was blasted away to make room for an eponymous observation deck. The history of the place has been bowdlerized; the waste from ­falls-­powered industries, buried. Taken together, these stories say a lot about America’s relationship with nature, Strand argues, and so she sets herself to rescuing the true Niagara from the memory ­hole.

The Native Americans who once lived in the region avoided the falls, with its rattlesnakes and dangerous river rapids. When Europeans arrived in the 17th century, they immediately set to dispos­sessing the local tribes. The patron saint of Niagara Falls, a city on the New York side of the river, was a ­19th-­century landowner named Peter Porter lauded for his purported ­proto-environmental views, but Strand discovers that he was more interested in war profiteering and land grabs than in philanthropy. She moves on to the history of the tacky museums, with their Egyptian mummies and ­two-­legged dogs, and the falls’ use as a backdrop to acts of daredevilry. No diversion or digression is too small. While she sketches each tale with humor, the kaleidoscopic narrative at times resembles one of the tawdry casinos around the falls that she ­de­plores—­lots of bright lights, jingling and jangling, but ultimately a place to satisfy a ­compulsion.

Yet it is hard to begrudge Strand her indul­gences. Her prose is cheeky and sharp. In two sentences, she limns the early life of Frederick Law Olmsted: “He went to sea and almost died of scurvy. He bought a farm and won a prize for pears.” Olmsted, the architect of New York’s Central Park, pushed in the 1870s to make Niagara a place of wooded paths for all classes of society to ­enjoy—­though Strand faults him for being patriarchal and elitist. With good reason, she is much harder on Robert Moses, another New York master planner, who, nearly a century later, ruthlessly paved the way ­(literally—­the Robert Moses Parkway divides the Niagara River from nearby communities) for a power authority that spawned toxic waste–dumping ­industries.

The book’s most compelling chapter examines Niagara Falls as a symbol for sex. Strand mixes the history of the honeymoon ­capital—­a tradition hastily evolved through heavy ­marketing—­with ruminations on Marilyn Monroe (the falls, like Marilyn, have “been girdled and boosted into the shape the audience wants”). And she weaves in scenes from an ­in-­town convention of the Red Hat Society, a club for women over 50 that revolves largely around merchandising and the slogan “Red Hatters Matter.” The parallels are incisive, even sadly ­profound.

Strand has produced a ­multi­layered book that occasionally sparkles and shimmers. But after a point, keeping up with her tireless reportage becomes exhausting. 

 may best be appreciated in dribbles, like Niagara Falls during the off-­season.

"Inventing Niagara: Beauty, Power, and Lies" 

by Ginger Strand, Simon & Schuster, 2008. 

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Eric Hand on the history of Niagara Falls

Over in a Barrel

Several years after their launch in 1977, the twin spacecraft 

 flung themselves past Jupiter, using the giant planet’s gravity as a booster rocket. Thanks to this innovation of orbital mechanics—and a once-in-176-years alignment of the planets—Saturn and even Uranus and Neptune lay within reach.

But what really propelled the two Voyagers to the edge of the solar system, writes Arizona State University environmental historian Stephen Pyne, was a rare alignment of political will and technological know-how. The Voyager program was born just before the Cold War spirit—and dollars—of Apollo dissipated and just after key advances occurred in microprocessors and software. This coincidence ushered Voyager from the launch pad to the firmament—where today the twin probes still coast on as the “grand gesture” of an era that began with the space race of the late 1950s and ’60s.

In Voyager, a long and occasionally labored meditation on the nature and meaning of exploration,Pyne braids his narrative with anecdotes from the two earlier exploratory eras: the flood of 15th-century ships that Portugal unleashed in search of gold and glory, and the intracontinental journeys of the late 18th century, rooted in the science of the industrial age Enlightenment and exemplified by Alexander von Humboldt’s exploration of South America.

Parallels abound. Like Voyager’s mission managers at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, Christopher Columbus had to hawk his plans for years to the powers that were before purse strings loosened. And, as with previous exploration missions, on which scientists were a rare luxury among soldiers and quartermasters, science was not all that was packed aboard Voyager. Of the two crafts’ total 1,817-pound weight, just 13 percent went to scientific instruments, with the rest going to other equipment and fuel.

But Pyne is also aware that the spacecraft tell a fundamentally different story. They are machines whose cameras have retrieved spectacular visions of dead places. These encounters contrast with the gripping (and often murderous) confrontations between earlier explorers and indigenous peoples. And while journeys of previous eras hewed mostly to the Odyssean ideal of the return, each Voyager spacecraft, having escaped the sun’s gravity altogether, will eventually exit the solar system and drift through the vast emptiness of the galaxy—perhaps outliving Earth.

Will the third age of exploration itself live on? After 

 took a last picture postcard of the solar system in 1990, the Voyager spacecrafts’ electronic eyes lidded shut. Today, their radio beacons pulse ever more wanly as their nuclear fuel runs out. Meanwhile, orbiting telescopes, parked near Earth, may have mooted future grand planetary tours like Voyager’s. Voyager discovered 26 new moons in total; the Hubble Space Telescope has discovered 48 around Jupiter alone. The deep of Earth’s oceans still beckons. Astronomers, with telescopes on the ground and in space, are hunting for the first Earth-like planet outside the solar system. And the Obama administration has pushed NASA to develop orbiting telescopes that will turn inward on Earth to study carbon cycles that are key to addressing climate change.

As enamored as he is of Voyager, Pyne understands that exploration can take these other forms. He writes of the moment in 1980 when 

 flew past Titan, the methane-shrouded moon of Saturn, whose soup of prebiotic amino acids and carbohydrates was supposed to illuminate something about Earth’s earliest history. But Titan’s murk remained mostly impenetrable to 

’s instruments. Meanwhile, wildfires raged around the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in the foothills of the San Gabriel Mountains. At the time, ecologists were just beginning to understand how inextricably life is linked to fire, which generates oxygen and hydrocarbon fuels, and, since humans have been around, often provides the spark of ignition. The wildfires offered a more vivid insight than 

 into how life evolved on Earth. Later advances in astrobiology would come not from outer space, but from Earth’s frozen deserts and geothermal pools—when, observes Pyne, “new eyes viewed seemingly old worlds afresh.”

 is a Knight science journalism fellow at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a reporter at 

Voyager: Seeking Newer World in the Third Great Age of Discovery

 by Stephen J. Pyne, Viking, 444 pp, 2011.

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What really propelled the two Voyagers to the edge of the solar system? A rare alignment of political will and technological know-how.