This book review critically examines Mary Doyle and Cynthia A. Drew's, Large-Scale Ecosystem Restoration. The book is a set of case studies of five watershed-wide ecosystem restoration projects, written from the perspectives of institutional/political history, economics, and ecology. This review assays the work's strengths and shortcomings, both as a source of information about the restoration efforts it covers and as a guide to the evaluation of other similar attempts to restore degraded watersheds.