OHQ vol. 115, no. 2 The book consists of a set of case studies centered on four pests: house flies, bedbugs, cockroaches, and rats. The material to flesh out the story of these animals and various efforts made to control them is drawn from a number of cities, including Washington, D.C., Baltimore,NewYork,Chicago,and Milwaukee. The initial chapters open with short vignettes that sketch out the lives, as it were, of the pests in question as they encountered the environment of the city. The chapters then move on to examine reform efforts designed to control these nuisances. This is primarily a twentieth-century story that begins, understandably, with the Progressive Era. Reformers tried to work magic, but tended to carry out their duties in a way that partitioned off the pest problem from the social and political realities of urban life. Somereformerssettheirsightsonmodernizing urban environments, housing in particular. Others turned to an array of chemicals, hoping for some kind of magic bullet that would banish the vermin for good. Biehler, however, points out that there were very few people who combined those techniques with efforts to actually empower the poor people who were locked in the battle with the pests in the first place. In that sense, the struggle by reformers to control those animals was, as she puts it, a “depoliticized and individualized” one (p. 8). Which brings us to the second part of Biehler’s book. In the two chapters that make up this final section,she focuses on the activists who took up the challenge of re-politicizing the pest issue. Here her concern is with the period since the 1960s. Chapter 5 is a great account of rats in the civil rights era. She takes what is a well-known story in U.S. history and gives it an interesting twist, showing how some black activists refused to section off the pest problem from the failed social and racial policies that sparked the civil rights movement. It is no secret, of course, that the federal government in the postwar years was far more eager to subsidize life in the booming suburbs than in the nation’s inner cities. This policy shifted resources away from central cities,underwrote further decline in the housing stock, and contributed to the problems that urban residents had with the pests. Moreover, the politics of pest control is, of course, still with us today. Bedbugs, it turns out, are an equal opportunity menace, infesting the homes of the rich as easily as the poor. In response, one member of Congress even went so far as to introduce legislation in 2009 to fight the problem — the Don’t Let the Bed Bugs Bite Act — though it died in committee. Nevertheless, the fact that Congress does not seem particularly eager to introduce comparable legislation to fight the effect of roaches or rats—pests that prey on the less privileged — does indeed seem to prove Biehler’s point. It is not easy to tell the story of rats and roaches,and sometimes this reader felt himself a little bogged down with the text. This is not the story of a single political figure and his era, after all. But, that said, Pests in the City is an important book and an excellent addition to urban environmental history. Ted Steinberg Case Western Reserve University Meander Scars: Reflections on Healing the Willamette River by Abby Phillips Metzger Oregon State University Press, Corvallis, 2013. Bibliography. 176 pages. $18.95 paper. Across the country from Maine to North Carolina, Texas, and the Pacific Northwest, Americans have sought to repair damage to river ecosystems, resulting in a flourishing Reviews river-restoration movement. Abby Phillips Metzger’s Meander Scars: Reflections on Healing theWillamette River studies human and nature interactions along the Willamette River of Oregon over time and examines current efforts to restore the river and its watershed. In the tradition of writers such as Terry TempestWilliams and Barry Lopez,the author intertwines her life and experiences with her study of and reflections on the riverscape and Willamette Valley landscape. She explores the river in a variety of ways. Kayaking with her husband, snorkeling, species collecting, and river rafting with...