The Rhine : an eco-biography, 1815-2000 /

Since the Congress of Vienna (1815), the Rhine River, flowing through Switzerland, France, Germany, and the Netherlands, has been an international project, a precursor to today's united Europe. Yet, as Cioc (Univ. of California, Santa Cruz) clearly shows, international cooperation and competition generally focused on navigation and industrial development, transforming a complex watershed into a highly traveled highway, waste canal, and power source. Indeed, attempts at restoration since the 1970s still show only limited results. The author painstakingly documents the victimization of the river as a geological and biological system at the hands of commercial, industrial, agricultural, and urban development, with special attention on shifting political interests and the role of coal, chemical industries, and hydroelectric plants. Still, one occasionally loses a sense of the river itself and those who live and work along its banks within a sometimes-repetitive catalog of government and corporate deprivations. While maps and charts are excellent, photographs and voices of citizens would have enriched the eco-biographical goals of the text. Nevertheless, as a model of interdisciplinary study and in its rich data, this is a work of multifaceted interest to European historians and environmentalists. ^BSumming Up: Recommended. All levels and collections. G. W. McDonogh Bryn Mawr College

In 1815, the Congress of Vienna placed the Rhine under an "international regime" and, seeking to promote free trade among the nations along its banks, established the Rhine Commission to manage it. From an economic standpoint, the scheme worked, but from an ecological perspective, the same engineering feats that made the river profitably navigable also sapped its natural dynamism, making it "Europe's romantic sewer." As demonstrated by historian Cioc (Pax Atomica: The Nuclear Defense Debate in West Germany during the Adenauer Era), the defilement of the Rhine is a case study in the tragedy of unintended consequences. But it is also a fascinating story because the river today is the product of the complex interplay among all of the major forces that shaped modern European history-industry, technology, economy, politics, and, finally, ecology. As such, its story is similar to those that could be told about many other major rivers. (At present, under the oversight of the Rhine Protection Commission, the river's environmental health is making modest but measurable progress.) This piece of impressive scholarship is suitable for academic libraries. (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.