Peter Coates, A Story of Six Rivers. History, Culture and Ecology, Reaktion Books, London, 2013, 350 pages, £25 hardback, ISBN 9781780231068.

Within the growing field of water history, histories of rivers have become an increasingly popular way to address the complex interactions between environment, economy and culture.  Humans like rivers, as they bring options for economic development and trade. Many large cities were and are located on river banks. Rivers can sustain many vital functions for and needs of human society, including drinking water, irrigation, transport, hydropower, and even borders. These functions, needs, and the rivers themselves are highly intertwined, and distinguishing between river history, culture and ecology is difficult. This is one of the things Peter Coates, a historian from the University of Bristol, shows in A Story of Six Rivers.

Writing on a popular subject such as rivers poses the challenge of originality. The Rhine and the Nile, for example, could be dammed with the books produced about them. Coates knows this and he therefore almost immediately introduces his selection dilemma to us. One river? That would not bring out its generalities, nor its specificities. So, more than one, but which ones? No Rhine, no Nile. Coates’ final six are all rivers that he has seen with his own eyes, but more importantly, they are all pretty original rivers, as their combination is.

Three of the selected rivers may sound as odd choices. The Mersey in England and the Los Angeles River in California, for example, are unlikely to be even be thought of as rivers by the most, whereas the Yukon in Canada and Alaska seems to flow in the middle of nowhere. The other three rivers selected by Coates are the mighty Danube in Central and Eastern Europe, the small Spree running in and around Berlin, and the Po, the large river crossing the flat plains of northern Italy. While certainly more popular than the Mersy or the Yukon, these three rivers, nevertheless, lack integrated historical accounts—hence the originality of Coates’ choice.

The author intends to provide us with “biographies” of all his rivers. Now, what is exactly a “river's biography”? It certainly includes a clear description of the river, with its hydrology (sources, flows, landscapes) and its people—those that lived with and changed the river, and possibly vice versa. Coates provides clear descriptions of these aspects, including humorous disputes between towns over the “real sources” for political and touristic reasons. Coates gives many examples of how his six rivers have been imagined by different people and represented in different media, including  films, stories, and images. Finally, Coates shows us how rivers have often fulfilled important political roles, from boundary making to commercial routes and symbols of power. The six stories about the rivers are interesting, original, and worth reading.

At the end of his introduction Coates promises the reader that his river biographies will all include a view from the perspective of the river itself, with its materiality and agency. Just a few pages earlier, he defined a river’s agency as fulfilling “its role in the hydrological cycle by pouring its water into the sea” and in having “personalities” like being “restless, temperamental” etc. Such definitions, however, remain problematic, at least in my view. The importance of material conditions in understanding rivers does not qualify for evidence of agency, nor does the transposition of human concepts on nature necessarily give nature agency either. Writing a story from the perspective of any river is thus a tricky job, if not  an impossible task for a human being.

In telling us that he will write from a river’s perspective, Coates claims more than he does bring in the chapters. For example, while he claims to have overcome the human-centeredness of other historians, his river descriptions largely build on human-centered approaches, including many pages describing films and images of the rivers. Apart from my (perhaps too) personal opinion that his film descriptions tend to be a bit long at times, the movies Coates describes are clear examples of rivers viewed from strongly human perspectives – as stages for human agency and as objects of human desire.

An example of such a human perspective is found in the documentary film on the Spree produced by Gerd Conradt and titled Die Spree: Sinfonie eines Flusses (2007). One of the earlier scenes in the film portrays a successful escape from East to West Germany by a swimmer crossing the Spree. The fact that the Spree was part of the border between West and East Berlin is vital to the understanding of the river’s history, but hardly a good example to suggest anything else than human-centeredness. Rivers do not become borders by themselves.

A similar comment can be made on the selection of Riccardo Bacchelli’s historical novel Il Mondo del Po (1938), and the screen adaptation of the novel by Alberto Lattuada in 1949. The fact that the action in novel and film takes place along the Po does not necessarily make the mill and river as the their main protagonists, as Coates suggests. From what I understand from the descriptions provided by Coates, the Po river here serves as background of a human story. I have no problems with such a story—and would have actually not known how to tell a river or water story differently—but again, Coates claims to have done something else.

The book is structured in six chapters (one on each river) preceded by an introduction. This structure may have prevented Coates from developing a more thorough comparison between his six rivers, based on the ideas he developed in the introduction. As I indicated above, I am not too convinced that what Coates claims in the introduction is what he actually does in the rest of the book. However, the few hints at comparison that he provides in his stories—including the observation that many rivers are cleaned up again after a period of manipulations by human agency that resulted in less desirable rivers for the next generation—do suggest that a stronger comparative effort would have been interesting. For example, Coates could have included comparisons between all his six rivers on issues like source identification,  river movies, and the intimate relationship between hydrology and humans. A more serious attempt to bring out aspects and issues  these rivers share (or do not share) would have allowed the reader—and Coates himself—to discover how much of the claims of the introduction are actually fulfilled within these river biographies.

The book’s last chapter on a river that is no longer a river—the Los Angeles River is a concrete trench—would have allowed for an intriguing discussion on the basic question: “what makes a river a river?” Coates refers to the clean-up campaign of the Mersey in Liverpool, which shows how ideas of river cleaning are closely related to ideas about what a river is in the first place. Yet, when the concrete ditch called “LA River” is indeed not a river, but something in need of restoration, what is exactly to be restored? What does a “real” LA River look like?

Overall, the book  includes six good stories of fascinating rivers, but I do believe it is one story short… The next edition of the book might have to include an overarching story to make the book really A Story of Six Rivers.