Too High and Too Steep: Reshaping Seattle’s Topography by David B Williams (4 stars)

This book captures a lot of excellent geographic history that Seattle residents will find interesting. I'm not a big fan of reading history and this kept my interest for essentially the whole book. If you've ever wondered why a large part of Seattle is listed as "high liquefaction" risk in the event of an earthquake, this book explains why.

The drastic geographic modifications made by white settlers were quite shocking to this modern reader, long-used to complex and lengthy planning approvals for even small changes:

Changing the shape of the land and bodies of water was as natural to settlers, developers, and urban boosters as building houses, cutting trees, or ignoring the rights of Native peoples.

Between 1898 and 1930, Seattleites washed and scraped away more than 11 million cubic yards of Denny, reducing a double-peaked, 240-foot-high mound to a pancake-flat tabula rasa.

Linking freshwater with salt water lowered Lake Washington by nine feet and reduced the total amount of shoreline in the city by more than thirteen miles. 

Those geographic modifications are impressive both from their sheer audacity as well as the technological innovation they drove, such as self-dumping scows that dumped most of Denny hill into Elliott Bay automatically.

The book also considers the geological timescale, explaining the effect of lahar flows from Mt. Rainier and delivering some chilling warnings:

We will do our best to counter those forces with good engineering and planning, but ultimately our lives will be changed the next time Mount Rainier sends a lahar our way or the Seattle Fault shifts the ground by twenty feet.

 4 stars.