Peter Ackroyd - Thames. The Biography [2007][A]

Book description
In this perfect companion to London: The Biography, Peter Ackroyd once again delves into the hidden byways of history, describing the river’s endless allure in a journey overflowing with characters, incidents, and wry observations.
Thames: The Biography meanders gloriously, rather like the river itself. In short, lively chapters Ackroyd writes about connections between the Thames and such historical figures as Julius Caesar and Henry the VIII, and offers memorable portraits of the ordinary men and women who depend upon the river for their livelihoods. He visits all the towns and villages along the river from Oxfordshire to London and describes the magnificent royal residences, as well as the bridges and docks, locks and weirs, found along its 215-mile run. The Thames as a source of artistic inspiration comes brilliantly to life as Ackroyd invokes Chaucer, Shakespeare, Turner, Shelley, and other writers, poets, and painters who have been enchanted by its many moods and colors.
In his signature entertaining and informative manner, Ackroyd allows the reader to dip into chapters in his own spirit, or to follow the Thames from source to sea.
Illustrated with maps and photographs, THAMES is a vivid, highly original mosaic of life by and on the water.

Editorial Reviews
From Publishers Weekly
Starred Review. For a river with such a famous history, England's Thames measures only 215 miles. Acclaimed novelist and biographer Ackroyd (Hawksmoor; Shakespeare) invites readers on an eclectic, sprawling and delightful cruise of this important waterway. The Thames has been a highway, a frontier and an attack route; it has been a playground and a sewer, a source of water and a source of power, writes Ackroyd. Historians believe the river may have been important for transport and commerce as early as the Neolithic Age. The ancient Egyptian goddess Isis has a long association with the Thames, which was used for baptisms, both pagan and Christian, during the Roman Empire. The British tribes tried to use the Thames as a defense against Julius Caesar's invasion, and the Normans built the Tower of London and Windsor Castle on the Thames as symbols of military preeminence. The royal waterway carried Anne Boleyn to both her coronation and her beheading, and famously served as inspiration for paintings by Turner and Monet and for Handel's Water Music, commissioned to associate the German-born George I with a potent source of English power. Elegant and erudite, Ackroyd's gathering of rich treats does the famed tributary proud. Illus., maps. (Nov. 4)
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From The New Yorker
This lavishly produced volume is Ackroyd's omnivorous paean to the shortest river in the world to acquire such a famous history. Eschewing standard organization, Ackroyd jumps from today's posh London banks to Roger Bacon's observatory at Grandpont to Dickens's deathlike and mysterious waterway. We learn about the riverbank's many species of willow (white, weeping, crack, cane osier), and about the Retribution and the Belliqueux, eighteenth-century prison boats that each held hundreds of men. A chapter on types of sludge through history makes one grateful for today's raw sewage, as opposed to the Intrails of bestes that washed up in the fifteenth century. A survey of the many ways in which the river can kill notes that most Thames suicides remain anonymous and unlamented. Not every tidbit will appeal to every reader, but the book demands to be read as it was written, according to one's fancy.Copyright ©2008 Click here to subscribe to The New Yorker

From Bookmarks Magazine
Peter Ackroyd can easily be forgiven his exaggeration in claiming that the Thames is more famous than the Amazon or the Mississippi. His gift for storytelling and lovely prose make Thames a rewarding read. Several critics thought the narrative structure should have flowed steadily from Point A to Point B instead of meandering, like the river itself, across space and time. They also bemoaned the long lists, generalizations, and repeated attempts to endow the river with spiritual significance. Despite these complaints, critics genuinely enjoyed Thames. "His Thames is not just the river that runs all the way from the Wiltshire borders through London to the sea (enough, you might think, for one book)," notes the reviewer from the Telegraph; "it is also the quintessential global River."Copyright 2008 Bookmarks Publishing LLC

From Booklist
The Thames River is a relatively short stream (215 miles); nevertheless, it is packed with powerful history. (“It has been called liquid history because within itself it dissolves and carries all epochs and generations.”) Ackroyd is a distinguished writer of both fiction and nonfiction. The Thames and he make a good pair, as demonstrated in what Ackroyd calls a “biography” of the river. In coverage that is not scholarly but not casual, either—definitely for the dedicated reader—the author views the river from every angle imaginable: geologically, geographically, economically, politically, and, most interestingly, psychologically (to Ackroyd, the Thames “is a metaphor for the country through which it runs” and has “done more to establish the idea of Englishness than any other national feature”). But the river as a subject for artists and writers is a topic that does not go neglected. From ancient times to the present day, the author charts the history of human habitation and usage of this vastly significant river. --Brad Hooper

Reviews
Selected by the San Francisco Chronicle as one of the "50 Best Nonfiction Books of 2008"!

“The concluding chapters of Thames are extraordinary, perhaps the finest [Ackroyd] has written in a prolific career. The estuary, so he tells us, was the landscape of nightmare to the Anglo-Saxon poets…. The reader feels no doubt that Ackroyd's knowledge of this area is real. The terror-and delight-that he conveys seems entirely authentic.”-The New York Times Book Review

“In myth, in metaphor and in fact, a river has no beginning and no end, and embarking upon a riverine biography might seem a fool's journey. In Ackroyd's sure hands, it is instead a revelation.”-San Francisco Chronicle
“Ackroyd writes so well…we learn about the birds on the river, the animals nearby, the fish that mostly died, then returned, the pleasure gardens and executions, the filth, the music and the art. Riverine structure, lovely and liquid language.”-Kirkus, starred review

“Acclaimed novelist and biographer Ackroyd invites readers on an eclectic, sprawling and delightful cruise of this important waterway…Elegant and erudite, Ackroyd's gathering of rich treats does the famed tributary proud.”
-Publishers Weekly, starred review

“Ackroyd is a distinguished writer of both fiction and nonfiction. The Thames and he make a good pair…[he] views the river from every angle imaginable.-Booklist

“Peter Acrkoyd’s writing is such a pleasure that Thames can be read all at once, with increasing delight, and afterwards dipped into, like stretches of the great waterway it charts and celebrates.”–Financial Times Magazine

"Thames smells authentically of the water…. It is not just the subject that sets this book apart but also the compelling new perspectives that [Ackroyd] brings."–The Times

“As soon as you open this account of the Thames, you will want to immerse yourself in it. . . . No one is better than Ackroyd at evoking the texture and atmosphere of the distant past.”–Daily Telegraph

“The pages glint with scintillating nuggets recovered from the river…. You might well think that the garlanded biographer of Dickens and Turner was born to write this extraordinary book.”–The Observer

About the Author
PETER ACKROYD is the author of London: The Biography, Albion: The Origins of the English Imagination, and Shakespeare: The Biography; acclaimed biographies of T.S. Eliot, Dickens, Blake, and Sir Thomas More; thirteen novels; and the series Ackroyd’s Brief Lives. He has won the Whitbread Book Award for Biography, the Royal Society of Literature’s William Heinemann Award, the James Tait Black Memorial Prize, the Guardian Fiction Prize, the Somerset Maugham Award, and the South Bank Award for Literature. He lives in London.