Thames.(Thames: Sacred River by Peter Ackroyd)(Brief article)(Book review)

This lavishly produced volume is Ackroyd's omnivorous paean to "the shortest river in the world to acquire such a famous history." Eschewing standard organization, Ackroyd jumps from today's posh London banks to Roger Bacon's observatory at Grandpont to Dickens's "deathlike and mysterious" waterway. We learn about the riverbank's many species of willow (white, weeping, crack, cane osier), and about the Retribution and the Belliqueux, eighteenth-century ...