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Is a River Alive?
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Critics
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Rating
98/99
Volume
73/99
Rating
95/99
Volume
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About This Book
The renowned nature writer and author of the best-selling author of Underland delivers a revelatory book that transforms how we look at the natural world—and life itself. Hailed as "a naturalist who can unfurl a sentence with the breathless ease of a master angler" (Holly Morris, New York Times), Robert Macfarlane brings his glittering style to a profound work of travel writing, reporting, and natural history. Is a River Alive? is a joyous exploration into an ancient, urgent idea: that rivers are living beings who should be recognized as such in imagination and law. Macfarlane takes readers on three unforgettable journeys teeming with extraordinary people and places: to the miraculous cloud-forests and mountain streams of Ecuador, to the wounded creeks and lagoons of India, and to the spectacular wild rivers of Canada—imperiled by mining, pollution, and dams. Braiding these journeys is the life story of the fragile chalk stream a mile from Macfarlane's house, which flows through his own years and days. Powered by Macfarlane's dazzling prose and lit throughout by other voices, Is a River Alive? will open hearts, challenge perspectives, and remind us that our fate flows with that of rivers—and always has.
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Reviews
"Macfarlane places the reader in immersive contact with the nature we have been lulled and dulled into regarding as mere backdrop to human activity ..."
"aligns stylistically with Macfarlane's previous work – overflowing (all water metaphors to be forgiven in advance), as it is, with gorgeous, vivid prose – it is far more political than its predecessors."
"Macfarlane's evangelical writing does more to convince me that rivers are alive than all the legal, biological and thermodynamic arguments of the act combined."
"Macfarlane's writing is as beautiful as the rivers and the hope he's describing."
"If we're lucky, we do not have to go far to find a stream or river to sit by."
"His prose aspires to poetry throughout ..."
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