This book provides a sketch of ten major rivers, including three in the Americas (Amazon, Mississippi, Mackenzie), four on the Eurasian landmass (Ob-Irtysh, Danube, Ganges, Chang Jiang), two in Africa (Nile, Congo), and one in Australia (Murray-Darling). Each chapter focuses on a single river and provides basic information on its geographic features, hydrology, riparian life, human cultures, agricultural productivity, and industrial uses, as well as its past ecology and current state of biologic health. There is a travelogue quality to the narrative: each chapter begins with a description of the river's headwaters, after which the author takes us slowly downstream, describing the terrain, vegetation, and cultural life along the way. On rare occasions this narrative strategy leads to unnecessary digressions and sideshows, but most of the time it allows readers to appreciate how different the upper reach is from the middle stretch and how different both are from the delta. Every river, the author suggests, is a tangle of branches, braids, tributaries, and outlets, just as it is a tangle of languages, cultures, and traditions.

The chapters on the Amazon and Mississippi are the most engaging, in part because these are larger-than-life rivers that completely dominate their respective geographical and cultural landscapes. The chapters on the Ganges, Congo, and Chang Jiang are weaker, suggesting that the author is less familiar with Africa and Asia than with the Americas and Europe. The chapter on the Mackenzie in northwest Canada is a welcome surprise; though it is the world's twelfth largest river in terms of drainage area and length, it is located far from the world's major cultural centers and is thus relatively unknown. Equally interesting is the chapter on the Murray-Darling, a relatively small river by world standards but one that looms large in Australia, accounting for about half of that continent's gross primary production.

The book has shortfalls. Wohl makes no real attempt to explain why she chose these rivers over others; the Amazon, Nile, and Mississippi are obvious “top ten” choices, but it is less clear why she chose the Ganges over the Indus, the Chang Jiang over the Huang He, or the Danube over the Rhine. Each chapter can be read as a stand-alone essay, since there is little cross-referencing from river to river. This is unfortunate for two reasons: a book with ten rivers as its subject matter ought to focus on comparing and contrasting their main features; and each of these rivers has been manipulated to one degree or another by engineering and river commissions, which is why so many of them now have a similar “generic” profile. The author tries to unify the book with “interludes” between each chapter that trace how a drop of water makes its way through the global water cycle from one river to the next, but this approach is more gimmick than substance. Instead of tracking water drops, it would have been more fruitful to recreate how modern river-engineering techniques (dams, concrete banks, etc.) found their way from one river to the next.