Book review: Robert Macfarlane’s wondrous Is A River Alive? maps the lives and deaths of water

By Robert Macfarlane
Non-fiction/Hamish Hamilton/Paperback/375 pages/$49.42

In the first eight pages of Is A River Alive?, British writer Robert Macfarlane covers 12,000 years in the life of a river. With dizzying virtuosity, he spins the reader through a vast sweep of time: the retreat of glaciers, the first human settlements, the rise and fall of civilisations through war and plague, his own birth – for this river is the unnamed chalk stream near his house – all the way till the summer of 2022, the hottest on global record, when the river nearly dies.