Thames: The Biography by Peter Ackroyd

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A review by Kathryn Shevelow

Of London's many pleasures, one of the most profound is a stroll along the south bank of the Thames on a warm summer evening, just as the long twilight begins to fade into night. Start at Westminster Bridge, where the Houses of Parliament cast their shimmering reflection onto the dark water's surface, and make your way east along the promenade crowded with theaters, museums, restaurants, shops and former riverine warehouses now transformed into blocks of fashionable flats. As you walk downriver, you pass more bridges -- postmodern Hungerford, utilitarian Waterloo, Victorian wrought iron Blackfriars -- while overhead the deceptively delicate wheel of the London Eye revolves, almost imperceptibly. Across the river glittering with reflected lights rises the congestion of buildings that constitutes the City of London, where Norman Foster's oversized "Gherkin" juts into the sky, dominating a cityscape more elegantly accented by the beautiful wedding-cake spire of St. Bride's, one of the...

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It is true, as Thomas J. Sugrue says at the outset of Sweet Land of Liberty, that histories of the civil rights movement and the era in which it was at its zenith tend to focus on the South, where segregation was de jure rather than de facto and where white resistance to African American claims was ...

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A novel set in the Indian subcontinent and published in the West bears the burdens of our preconceptions. It is easy to assume that a book about a high-caste child bride who becomes a widow will fix its sights only on the girl's woes and the deep injustices of caste. But while Padma Viswanathan's...

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