August 22, 2022
“We come from water, and water runs through us. It carries our chemistry and our stories,” writes biologist Beer (Cool Nature) in this lyrical, moving survey. She opens with a tragedy: in 2012, Beer’s close friend died in a kayaking accident on the River Rawthey in North West England. In the wake of that loss, Beer began to study water in its many forms, from rivers of gas in the sky to glaciers that “groan and boom and spew rivers from their nostrils.” With a poet’s gift for description, Beer makes her global travels vivid. She lovingly details an encounter with a beaver in the wild and covers their reintroduction after extinction in the area, all in service of a broader look at the history of humanity’s “tinkering with” water flow, which goes back for millennia. Beer also covers chemistry (“The willingness of these copious ingredients to combine makes water very abundant stuff”), climate change, and the depiction of unusual water phenomena in literature (Arthur Conan Doyle wrote about the haunting sound of water moving in The Hound of the Baskervilles). She’s got an ability to make even a small moment resonate, such as her child’s serendipitous discovery of a carnivorous sundew plant, with sharp prose and quick pacing. The result is an aquatic tour de force.