Rivers: A Very Short Introduction

Very Short Introductions #311

by Nick Middleton

Rivers have acted as cradles for civilization and agents of disaster; a river may be a barrier or a highway, it can support trade and sediment, culture and conflict. This Very Short Introduction is a celebration of rivers in all their diversity. Geographer Nick Middleton covers a wide and eclectic range of river-based themes, from physical geography to mythology, to industrial history and literary criticism. Offering a truly global look at rivers, with examples from all continents, including Egypt, India, and Bangladesh, Middleton considers the role that rivers have played in human history from settlements and trade to warfare, and also looks at the human impact upon rivers by the construction of dams and cutting of channels.

Genres: Science, Nonfiction, Geography, History, Audiobook, Nature, Environment

127 pages, Paperback

First published April 26, 2012

About the author

Nick Middleton is a British physical geographer and supernumerary fellow of St Anne's College, Oxford. He specialises in desertification.

Nick Middleton was born in London, England. As a geographer, he has travelled to more than 50 countries. Going to Extremes is a television programme for Channel 4 about extreme lifestyles, in which Middleton experiences life in the hostile conditions other cultures must endure. He has appeared on BBC 2's Through the Keyhole.

Reviews

[Usfromdk · Rating 1 out of 5]

"Greek mythology... Islamic gardens ... Flood legends... Mesoamerican flood myths... Yoruba cosmology... The Atlantic salmon occupied a special place in Celtic mythology ... River Spirits..."

1 star because of the inclusion of stuff like the above. No need to waste pages on crap when you've shown in other parts of the book that you're actually able to write a decent book. Some parts of this book's okay, but other parts are not.

[Kayleigh]

this took me three checkouts from hoopla...and it's only 4.5 hours as an audiobook. partially i think it was the fact that it's written to be very information-heavy and dry, partially because it's odd reading a book on audio that clearly has illustrations and figures that readers are meant to refer to, but MAINLY it's because the audiobook narrator was so, sooooo boring. wow.

ultimately glad i did stick with it because a lot of the information was really interesting and is shaping how i interact with the james and other rivers i come across and how i think about patterns of ecosystem and human development! i love a book that gives me information that i can use to build into my understanding of the natural world and the interaction between living beings in it. the first chapter is the most boring so it's worth it to press on!

[Josiah Richardson · Rating 3 out of 5]

A good introduction to rivers. Middleton took an approach that was unexpected for me - and honestly not what I had hoped for. In college, my ecology course covered a lot about rivers and it was terrifically interesting. They are the veins of the earth and their importance cannot be overstated. I expected Middleton to focus on the scientific background and understanding of rivers, but instead the focus was on the history of rivers, how rivers were viewed in different societies and religious, famous rivers on this earth, and how we use rivers today. This may be preferable to some people who are looking for this type of information, but it went in the opposite direction of what I was looking for.

[ingot · Rating 3 out of 5]

like listening to a wikipedia article, mwah

friends who I force to answer my trivia questions, y'all are about to learn a loooot of river facts

[Jeremy Neufeld · Rating 3 out of 5]

Decent entry in the VSI series and a perfectly adequate little primer on physical geography and hydrology. Want to get a very basic handle on how discharge is measured or how sedimentation works? You can bang this out in an hour.

But the sections on human culture are pure fluff. I know these are intended to be wide-ranging surveys but do the editors really think it's valuable for technical experts to spend chapters pointing out "hey, would you look at that, rivers appear in a bunch of myths" or "yep rivers appear in some books"?

Not the best of this series (say, Robert Allen's on Global Economic History) but readable, which is more than I can say for some entries.

[Spencer Reads Everything · Rating 5 out of 5]

Nick Middleton opens this book by trying to define a river and immediately running into trouble. The Oxford English Dictionary calls it a copious natural stream of water flowing in a channel to the sea or a lake. That seems reasonable until Middleton starts pulling at the threads. Rivers in cold climates may be frozen for months at a time. Desert rivers may have no water at all for most of the year. After six thousand years of human modification, almost no river can be called entirely natural. He eventually borrows from a 19th-century geographer who, faced with the same definitional tangle, simply invoked John Stuart Mill: everyone has a notion of what a river is sufficiently correct for common purposes.

This pragmatic, intellectually honest opening sets the tone for a book that consistently resists simple categories and easy conclusions. Middleton is a physical geographer at Oxford, and his treatment of the science is clear and rigorous: the hydrological cycle, the four dimensions of river systems, the extraordinary scale of the Amazon (which carries roughly a fifth of all the fresh water flowing across the Earth's surface), the prehistoric Missoula Floods, which had a peak discharge greater than ten times the combined flow of every river on Earth today.

But Rivers is far more than a science book. Middleton ranges across Greek mythology, Hindu pilgrimage, Koranic paradise, and Norse flood legends with the same authority he brings to sediment transport and flood hydrology. The chapter on sacred flows is the most surprising and in many respects the most memorable in the book. Nearly every major world religion, and many smaller ones, has rivers at the heart of its cosmology: the five rivers of the Greek underworld, the four rivers flowing from the Garden of Eden, the Ganges as a goddess and a site of final liberation, the Vaitarna River across which Hindu sinners must wade to reach the afterlife. This universality suggests that something about the constant movement of water maps onto the deepest human concerns about time, transformation, and the boundary between the living and the dead.

The historical chapter on liquid histories shows how the predictable flood cycles of the Nile, the Tigris-Euphrates, and the Indus Valley created the agricultural surpluses that made urban civilization possible, and how rivers shaped military history from Hannibal's winter ambush at the Trebia to Caesar's world-changing crossing of the Rubicon. The literary sections, tracing the river from Virgil's Aeneid through Twain's Mississippi to Conrad's Congo, demonstrate how the same physical features that make rivers geographically significant, their flow, their direction, their crossing-points, have also made them the most persistent symbols in world literature.

The chapter on tamed rivers is the sobering reckoning the book has been building toward. The Aral Sea story, in which the diversion of two rivers for Soviet-era irrigation caused the fourth largest lake in the world to lose more than half its area and most of its volume within a few decades, is presented without editorializing but hits with full force. Middleton surveys the global scale of dam construction, the tensions between hydroelectric power and ecological health, and the growing challenge of climate change, which is simultaneously intensifying floods in some systems and depleting water flow in others.

Heraclitus said you cannot step twice into the same river. Middleton's book makes a similar claim about rivers as subjects of study: every time you think you have a firm grasp on what a river is, it reveals another dimension. Physical, sacred, historical, cultural, ecological, political: rivers are all of these things at once, and Rivers: A Very Short Introduction does justice to that complexity in under 150 pages.

For more of my thoughts, check out my video:
https://youtu.be/ttSJVIXBwXc
For more reviews, check out my channel:
http://www.youtube.com/@SpencerReadsE...

[AnnaG · Rating 3 out of 5]

I really like the OUP Very Short Introduction series generally, and I thought this would be an intriguing subject to read about. In terms of the series, the information here is as rigorous and interesting, but overall this book is not as successful at conveying that information.

The chapters have unrelated random segments spliced in and jump around a lot. It's difficult to follow the flow of the writers thoughts, which given the topic is somewhat ironic.

[Tyler Stevenson · Rating 4 out of 5]

Good rundown of our attachment to rivers

This book highlighted a lot of cultural benefits that we gain from rivers. It was a good read. The reason for the four stars is that I thought it would contain more scientific knowledge on rivers like was done in other books in this series. Good book nevertheless.

[Sireesha · Rating 4 out of 5]

Short but fascinating little audiobook which covers interesting aspects of rivers. From impacts on trade and disputes about water supply when rivers flow through several countries. And then there's fishing and environmental impacts of introduced species. Too short to cover everything but informative nonetheless.

[Estela · Rating 3 out of 5]

I enjoyed this as a collection of interesting facts about rivers, from a plethora of different genres ranging to ecology to history, mythology, and the arts.

One of the problems I've had with many books in this collection is how Eurocentric (or Western-centric) they can be, so this one's inclusion of many examples from all over the globe was a pleasant surprise.

[Amanda Witt · Rating 5 out of 5]

As it states, this book is a 'short introduction' to the topic but has a lot of information, including the general history of how major cities around the world have been built on their rivers, some named after the landscape, and modern man made works including dams etc.

[JC · Rating 5 out of 5]

Really good, and it really helped me rethink rivers from so many other angles that I had not yet considered. And I have been thinking about rivers a lot, even before I got into researching watermills for school.

[Palswd · Rating 4 out of 5]

Good coverage on various aspects of rivers, with many examples; writing is very accessible; would have liked a section about river-based recreation.

[Jessica Weida · Rating 3 out of 5]

Anything and Everything you wanted to know about rivers

[Nikolas · Rating 5 out of 5]

Informative and well-structured introduction to rivers and their effects on human history, wildlife and topography (audiobook).

[Ajhov Regmi · Rating 3 out of 5]

Fun read that wasn’t super scientific or anything, but not a bad thing at all because it’s very interesting to read on the impacts of rivers in human cultures and religions. I would give 3.7

[Lee · Rating 3 out of 5]

Geography section was good, but the other sections were kinda boring. He is a geography expert, so it is not surprising that this section, which makes up the first quarter of the book, was the best. But he probably should have just not written the parts he wasn’t interested in. If history is not your jam, don’t write a history chapter.

[Daniel Wright · Rating 3 out of 5]

Heraclitus observed that one can never step into the same river twice. In fact, according to the author of this splendid book, one can never step into a river once, since it is not entirely clear what a river actually is, except that everyone seems to basically agree on what is a river and what isn't. Despite a not altogether promising start, Middleton manages to get quite a wide range of interesting material from his topic, ranging from the literary, cultural, mythological and social to the natural and scientific.

[John · Rating 4 out of 5]

I really enjoyed thinking about rivers. I've lived my whole life (as I suspect most of us have) on or near a river, and the book talked about some of the science underlying rivers, their presence in myths, legends, and sacred traditions, their impact on history and on culture, and humanity's impact on rivers.

The book was fairly disjunct and jumped around a lot. If I was in a different mood, I'd probably have been ticked off, but it was just what a wanted: an intellectual buffet of different ways and examples of thinking about rivers.

[Jorgon · Rating 3 out of 5]

I am becoming quite a fan of this series. While they will certainly not make an expert out of one, if you want a brief overview of a given subject that can be read in 2-3 hours, they are great. And there is always a decent bibliography and suggested reading list at the end, should one care to continue with the subject.

And this is one of them, so not much to say, except that it is solid, informative, and, of course, brief and broad rather than deep.

[Keeko · Rating 5 out of 5]

Very well done. I feel as if I had hopped around the world visiting the rivers and dams that he writes about. They are no longer just names or lines on a map. I plan to check out his other books too.

[Vikas Datta · Rating 4 out of 5]

Concise yet informative account of the geographical, religious, economic and environmental aspects of these mighty forces of nature