A Brief Atlas of Vanished Rivers

The best kind of history: you finish it and the map in your head is different.

Calloway follows twelve rivers that no longer exist — diverted, drained, built over — and uses each one to explain a city. The chapter on the Fleet is worth the price alone. She has a historian's patience and a journalist's sense of when to stop. Five stars because I've already bought two copies for other people.

Fascinating in chapters, exhausting as a whole. Read it like a magazine.

Every individual chapter is excellent and I'd hand any one of them to a coworker. But twelve in a row is a lot of drainage. I put it down for a month around river seven and came back happier. Recommend if you dip in and out. Don't try to read it straight through on a commute — I did, and it flattened.