RIVERS OF POWER
HOW A NATURAL FORCE RAISED KINGDOMS, DESTROYED CIVILIZATIONS AND SHAPES OUR WORLD
LAURENCE C SMITH
Allen Lane, 356pp, £20
American geography professor Laurence C Smith believes that ‘rivers hold a grandly underappreciated importance to human civilisation as we know it. Our reliance on them – for natural capital, access, territory, wellbeing and power – has sustained us for millennia and grips us still.’ Dominic Sandbrook in his Sunday Times review thought Smith ‘does a good job of reminding us how important rivers were in the birth of civilisation’ and ‘argues persuasively that the real problems come when, by commanding the high ground from where a river flows, one country controls another’s source of water’.
However, ‘like so many geographers who decide to write books explaining all human history, he ranges so widely and superficially that he ends up saying nothing very much about everything. One moment we are reading about the Nilometers used by the ancient Egyptians to measure river levels, the next we are on to the rise of Chinese communism. As a result, entire sections read like extracts from a child’s encyclopaedia... Few of these narratives lead anywhere, and sometimes you detect an almost tragic sense of desperation.’
A self-confessed ‘fluviophile’, David Aaronovitch in the Times found the book ‘instructive and entertaining on the subject of riparian disasters, natural and man-made’. Smith is ‘a decent and enthusiastic writer, whose prose is clear and who explains scientific concepts well’, but Aaronovitch regretted that the author ‘felt it necessary to throw in quite a lot of extraneous history in what I felt was an unnecessary attempt to prove the importance of rivers. I could quite easily have managed a little more on the geography of rivers and how they vary.’