Briefly Noted Book Reviews | The New Yorker

Is a River Alive?, by Robert Macfarlane (Norton). Rivers in Ecuador, India, and Canada provide the settings for this elegant travelogue, which asks whether a natural entity, such as a river, can be regarded as a living thing. Macfarlane approaches the question by contrasting rivers’ legal rights with those enjoyed by corporations—often quite close to those afforded to persons—which dam, drill, and divert rivers in damaging ways. He also considers the “rights of nature” movement. In 2008, some of its precepts were enshrined in Ecuador’s constitution, a development that has helped to protect the country’s waterways—an example of policy that Macfarlane sees as a cause for optimism. “Rivers are easily wounded,” he writes. “But given a chance, they heal themselves with remarkable speed.”

I’ll Tell You When I’m Home, by Hala Alyan (Avid Reader). This affecting memoir, by a Palestinian American poet, is structured around the arc of a surrogate pregnancy, but it bears the emotional weight of the events that preceded it: infertility, miscarriages, a strained marriage, and exile. Told in fragments, the book spans Alyan’s itinerant upbringing, in Kuwait, Beirut, and elsewhere, and her life as an adult in the United States. Storytelling, especially among women, is shown as a means of establishing continuity, despite ruptures both geographic and political. Meditating on the contradictions that define her bicultural background, Alyan writes, “You exist in both identities like a ghost, belonging to neither.”

Illustration by Ben Hickey

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