Macfarlane’s touch is deft, giving us exactly enough to consider the question while also showing us how this is not just about rivers but about us ... Macfarlane’s writing is as beautiful as the rivers and the hope he’s describing.
Perhaps the most moving and beautiful part of his book comes in the interludes between visits to faraway rivers in which Macfarlane tells the history of a small spring near his home ... If we’re lucky, we do not have to go far to find a stream or river to sit by. The revelations in this passionate book will make that quiet, common experience even more life-giving.
Macfarlane is justifiably known for lush, evocative prose. But his epiphanies can be so portentous that I started to feel restless, even amid so many gorgeous Macfarlanian sentences. When he observes what he sees, his descriptions are original, sinuous and often startling; when he’s in thrall to a reverie, his descriptions get windy and sentimental ... Macfarlane weaves in plenty of factual information, including vivid passages on the biodiversity of cloud forests and the destruction caused by metal mining. But his method of persuasion isn’t primarily scientific; it’s affective and moral ... There is so much solemn virtue packed into this book I was grateful for the occasional bits of human comedy.
A wide-ranging feat of reporting ... Macfarlane introduces us not only to the rivers in these singular parts of the world but also to the environmentalists trying to save them, as well as the novel philosophical program that unites these efforts ... Vivid, sometimes even flowery ... Not just informative but frequently beautiful, full of luscious lines ... Unfortunately, Macfarlane is also prone to overwriting and the kind of breathless observations that strike people on drugs as profound ... As it so often does, the sentimentality of the writing reflects a certain sentimentality of thought.
Macfarlane is the most engaging—the least snarky—of British writers ... He also, savingly, has a sense of humor ... Burning with an Elizabethan energy and curiosity, grounded in the conviction that humans are not the center of the universe, he ends up, on those rapids, showing us how a river can be his ruler, his god, and, most invaluably, his survivor.
Exhaustive — and at times exhausting ... At once a scholarly treatise and a poetic memoir ... It is the author’s language that takes the biggest leaps. Macfarlane is a lyrical writer, his prose packed with alliteration and imagery, much of it connected to rivers and water. But while the overall effect is hypnotic, at times his metaphors are strained ... For all these missteps, this is a profoundly beautiful and moving work.
Lyrical ... I can’t think of another author who writes so unflinchingly about our responsibility to the environment or who speaks so honestly of pain and fear. Though the book ripples with lyricism, however, it has some suspenseful moments.
By exploring four extraordinary bodies of water and the people and laws aiming to protect them, Macfarlane examines a question whose time has come, whether we like it or not ... Extending out from this water body is a rich web of human allies, each of whom plays a key role in its protection. Macfarlane makes this web visible ... Is a River Alive? illustrates what resistance to extraction can look like on the ground, and also what might be awakened in us when we begin to live with rivers, recognizing them as co-creators of our past, our present, and—more and more—our future.
Haunting ... Macfarlane places the reader in immersive contact with the nature we have been lulled and dulled into regarding as mere backdrop to human activity ... Macfarlane’s book is a grand gesture in the direction of honoring Jonas’s plea to reimagine our human obligation to the planet.
Running like a crosscurrent beneath Macfarlane’s passionate, activist storytelling is a bracingly new approach to nature writing. It swirls together a Mike Davis–level mastery of earth science, a Philip Larkin–esque ear for the music of sentences, a spooky phenomenology ... A Joycean riverrun of a book, giddy with eddies, twisting and turning from miniaturist masterpieces of close observation to real-life characters who’ve stepped out of a magical-realist novel to wordplay worthy of Lewis Carroll to Whitmanesque lists of plant and animal names recited for their sheer deliciousness, so musical they make a kind of birdsong in the head.
There’s a bit more to Is a River Alive than simple odd mystification. There’s the aforementioned sense of wonder, which extends to virtually every adventure and encounter Macfarlane relates ... There’s a good deal of that belly-tumbling joy in this book, regardless of its dippy animist inclinations.
There is no preachiness. It’s an answer that comes to reader and Macfarlane together ... The narrative pull is strong in this book. I kept wanting to go back to it. Macfarlane has yet again demonstrated his genius as an author in creating a book that is alive, that has personality, that talked to me. I was sad when it ended. It has flowed into my daily thoughts ever since, much like a river continues to flow into the sea.
The result is a ravishing and enlightening inquiry shaped by hydropoetics and a deeply considered commitment to rejuvenating, cherishing, and protecting rivers and all of nature.
