“Running Out is the single most important account of the aquifer depletion crisis in western Kansas. Bessire weaves together the threads of culture, science, history, and personal generational experience to show how the crisis developed and why it continues, and points the way forward for reversing this devastating trend.”—Connie Owen, water rights attorney and director of the Kansas Water Office“One of the best books I’ve read this year.”—Amitav Ghosh, award-winning author of Sea of Poppies“Both gripping page-turner and gentle mediation, Lucas Bessire’s Running Out is an all-American history of farming and ranching life on the high plains as the water slowly disappears from the parched and much-abused landscape. Rich with depth and pathos and insight, this unique volume is a genuine pleasure to read.”—Wendy Williams, New York Times bestselling author of The Horse and The Language of Butterflies"Bessire's Running Out masterfully shifts among scales and genres and in doing so lets the personal, the historic, and the geologic reveal their intimacies and competing urgencies. A beautiful and unusual book, and wholly original."—Rivka Galchen, author of Little Labors"Lucas Bessire writes like a close witness to more than 150 years of ecological and human devastation on the Kansas plains. His distinctly American voice is engaging and vivid, mixing deeply rooted personal and national history, poetic observation, lucid despair, and calm yet stirring outrage. Running Out is destined to be a contemporary classic."—Francisco Goldman, author of Monkey Boy"A delight. Running Out is a powerful examination of the forces draining the High Plains and an intimate meditation on complicity and responsibility. This book is for anyone who is concerned about climate change, who grieves for the aquifers, or who longs to understand the problems now facing us as we brush up against the limits of the natural world."—Lauren Groff, New York Times bestselling author of Fates and Furies"Powerful. Bessire tells a tragic and infuriating story of massive, earth-shattering loss juxtaposed with the cultivated world and the human search for meaning and purpose."—Kathleen Stewart, author of A Space on the Side of the Road: Cultural Poetics in an "Other" America"A marvelous achievement. Weaving a thread of human decency through a blanket of unrecoverable loss, Bessire delivers a damning message about our great incapacity to respond to an imminent crisis and our misplaced faith in an agricultural economic treadmill."—Loka Ashwood, author of For-Profit Democracy: Why the Government Is Losing the Trust of Rural America