by Bob Deans (The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, $24.95)

"Racing along the rivers of cement that crisscross the United States or soaring in airliners high overhead, it's easy for modern and mobile Americans to forget that until just the past century or so, it was water that tied this country together. The story of the James River is the story of those beginnings, taking us back to our headwaters as a nation.

This is a biography of sorts, a tale of the most historic waterway in America, the place where Africans, English, and Native Americans first came together four centuries ago to form the beginnings of a new civilization that would change the world. The story is ugly in places. Seldom is it fully just or fair. It is, though, a fully American story, the story of the river where America began.

Just beyond this river's silt-laden shallows and sand-rimmed shores can be found the rawest materials of nation building: accomplishment and ruin, charity and greed, ignorance and vision, selfishness and sacrifice. Within earshot of the river's watery spine lived nearly every kind of man and woman that history has yet to offer up: slaves and planter barons, patriots and spies, rebels and rabble-rousers, soldiers of fortune, smelters and smugglers, turncoats and thieves, plantation barons, parishioners, partisans, printers, and purveyors of insurrection, grand schemes, and lofty ideals." --excerpted from the book's introduction