Customer Rating:  
Summary: heavy going
Comment: the author rambles on, goes off on tangents, and the whole thing is just too much effot to read due to the overly wordy way in which the book is written. Very dissapointing.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Old stock in poor condition.......
Comment: I can't comment on the book since I returned it immediately. Amazon must have had this lying around in a filthy warehouse: it arrived filthy with top and bottom spine well bashed and the wrap-around (with the boat drawing) well worn. All credit to Amazon though that their returns process is excellent. I notice that in the 10 days since I bought it, Amazon have increased the price by 10p! Unusual for old stock (the hardback is obviously out of print)! Anyway, if you think you've sourced the hardback version at a good price, maybe think again. I'm off to pay more at Borders, but at least I know I'm getting a pristine copy.
Customer Rating:
Summary: A box of delights
Comment: Chapeau! Kudos! Peter Ackroyd has done a terrific job with this book. From his early novel _Hawksmoor_, Ackroyd has evolved into the chronicler par excellence of London, both through his book of the same name and by the flavour of London life in his biographies of Shakespeare, Chaucer, Sir Thomas More, Dickens, Blake, and other works (both fictional and non).
This cornucopia has history, geography, geology, spirituality, sociology, literary and cultural referencing, psychology, life cycles, transport, trade, ecology, hedonism, commercialism. It's a staggeringly accomplished chronicle and a worthy tribute to the liquid heart of London.
Ackroyd ranges masterfully from facts and statistics - some of them fascinating - through to dreams and legends. Although London dominates, this deals with the villages and towns along the Thames - e.g., Windsor as represented by the poet Alexander Pope. The historical thread moves from the prehistoric river, and the Thames Caesar conquered, through to the modern flood protection afforded by the Thames Barrier. Notwithstanding its erudition, the flow is ceaseless and the touch light, so that it's an easy, satisfying read.
Thankfully, Ackroyd controls his trademark fascination in filth and murk aspects, balancing them judiciously with the elevated, refined and spiritual. He delightedly describes the Fleet as "merd-urinous", "wholly rank" and "the excremental centre of London's polluted life". This is tempered by the view "at twilight, a soft grey, a lacustrine light."
With its buried coins and weapons, syringes, severed heads, the river is a "depository of past lives" but Ackroyd gives us a final vision of "estuarial river" rushing to the "sea's embrace."
I can do no better than let the chapters speak for themselves:
1. "The Mirror of history": river as fact (statistics) and metaphor - the "museum of Englishness", symbolizing the national character. Time of the river: Hydrologic and geologic.
2. Father Thames - river deities, Thames Basin, birth/source aspects
3. Issuing Forth: tributaries, especially the Fleet.
4. Beginnings: Ice Ages, barrows, and henges; Caesar and Vikings.
5. The sacred river - saints and ruins: includes Norman palaces, Westminster Abbey, monasteries(work and education), plague and fire.
6.Elemental and Equal: riverine cycle/essence and social upheavals/revolutions.
7. The working river -: River boats, London Bridge and subways, river law and conservation; the criminal element (theft, witches); watermen, porters, weir keepers.
8. River of trade - wharves, mills, breweries, docks, modern decline - new financial districts e.g. Canary Wharf and Docklands.
9. The Natural River: fog, wind, rain, the Thames Barrier (flood protection). Sacred woods and trees, villages, swans and whales (!)
10. A stream of pleasure - pubs, sports, carnivals, Lord Mayor's pageant, physic gardens Contrasts with mortality, sewers, and typhus in the 18th-19th centuries.
11. The healing spring - wells, hospitals, flowers. A rhapsodic chapter....
12. The river of art - Turner, Conrad, Jerome - chroniclers (the 16th-century antiquarian John Leland), novelists (Dickens, Grahame), poets Chaucer, Spenser, Milton, Pope, Shelley, Arnold.
13. Shadows and depth - Visions of Carroll and Traherne. Local history; dreams and legends.
14. The river of death - riverine findings (coins, weapons, syringes, severed heads). Mythology. Suicides, murders, drownings.
15. The river's end - the estuarial river which "rushes to the sea's embrace."
A grand achievement. Prepare to be delighted, amazed - and moved.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Strangely compelling
Comment: Rather like The Thames itself, this book has a mysterious beguiling quality. It draws you in and won't let you go. Ackroyd's prose, his playful mingling of history and legend, his almost overwhelming attention to detailed research combine to make this a compelling, oddly unsettling read. I learned so much.
Customer Rating:
Summary: A book to dip in to
Comment: This is an interesting and eclectic look at the River Thames by the author of 'London: The Biography'. The meat of the book is a series of vignettes dealing with different aspects of the river, its people, and it's environs. Also included is what the author titles 'An Alternative Topography, from source to sea' which is fascinating in its own right. This is really a book to dip into, rather than to read from end to end, and in some places it gets a little too mystical for my taste. It has it's own fascination, though, and I wouldn't hesitate to recommend it - especially to read in bed before you go to sleep.
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