Martin Hendriksma

This starts out like a regular travelogue, with the author trekking up to the Swiss lake that is considered to be the source of the Rhine. But that's rather misleading - in practice, what this is is a series of essays, each constructed in classic journalistic style around a Topic, a Place, and an Interviewee (or preferably two interviewees). Hendriksma brings in a German baron to talk about the wine industry, the owner-skipper of a Rhine barge and the Secretary-General of the Central Commission for Navigation on the Rhine to talk about the river as a transport artery, a French mayor to talk about the Rhine as a frontier (his German opposite-number cancelled the interview at the last minute, so Hendriksma has to imagine what he would have said), the son of one of the last salmon-fishermen on the river and a fish-conservation expert to talk about pollution and the salmon and eel fisheries, the late Clemens Brentano and Robert Schumann to talk about the Rhine in the Romantic imagination, a Dijkgraaf and a NIMBY protester to talk about climate-change and flooding, and so on.

It's all very interesting, there's quite a good mix of history, economics, culture, and engineering, and I learnt a few things I didn't know (for instance, that the CCNR, established in 1815, is the world's oldest extant international organisation: I'd have guessed at something to do with posts - 1874 - or telegraphy - 1865). Hendriksma also sees Dutch water-management through less generous eyes than some of the other books on the subject I've read: the theme here seems to be that the Dutch in the first half of the 19th century were far less keen on throwing big money at necessary improvements than the rest of the countries along the Rhine, and that it was only the building of the Antwerpen-Köln railway (the "Iron Rhine") that woke them up and made them realise that it was in Dutch interests for there to be fast and efficient navigation between Rotterdam and the industrial cities of Germany. And similarly with the pollution crisis of the 1950s-1970s and the flood peril of the 1990s...

Hendriksma cites Jonathan Raban as an inspiration, but don't take that too literally. This isn't literary travel writing in that sort of tradition, and it doesn't need to pretend to be: it's good, solid, analytical journalism, with a careful balance of entertainment and hard facts.… (plus d'informations)