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  • Exploring the Brazos River: From Beginning to End
  • Kenna Lang Archer
Exploring the Brazos River: From Beginning to End. By Jim Kimmel, photographs by Jerry Touchstone Kimmel. (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2011. Pp. 192. Color and b&w illustrations, maps, figures, references, index. ISBN 9781603444323, $44.95 paper.)

Exploring the Brazos River: From Beginning to End by Jim Kimmel is one in a series of books published by Texas State University's River Systems Institute. Eschewing the staid style common to academic texts, the institute published this work as a coffee table book, complete with brilliant photographs. Popular histories occasionally sacrifice detail for accessibility, but this text infuses its descriptions with information about the scientific, cultural, and historical nature of the river that is both digestible and comprehensive. That is what Kimmel presents in this text—description. There seems to be no overriding argument as the author focuses on introducing readers to the Brazos and treating this river as a single, if complex, entity. He carries that emphasis through the text, providing GPS markers for many of the locations discussed in the text and encouraging readers to find these locations on Google Earth. This is a brilliant strategy. The in-text numbers are admittedly distracting, but the inclusion of coordinates enlivens the potentially sluggish story of stream-flows and shoals.

Although Kimmel does not present any thesis, he does introduce readers to a number of intriguing ideas. Most surprisingly, he discusses the "Brazos River Song," "Ain't No More Cane on the Brazos," and the "Brazos Boat Glee," three songs written about the Brazos River. Kimmel incorrectly states that Mary Austin Holley's "Brazos Boat Glee" does not mention the Brazos (in fact, one line in the second stanza mentions the river), but his discussion of these cultural artifacts nonetheless provides an effective complement to the scientific and historical reviews. Kimmel also offers an interesting look at the person of John Graves, who is frequently credited with preventing the damming of the Brazos River. He challenges several ideas that Graves penned in the now-classic text, Goodbye to a River: A Narrative (1960), hoping in particular to refute the ideas that 1) few people care about the Brazos River and 2) the complexity of rivers prevents people from knowing them as an integrated whole. Kimmel successfully challenges both ideas.

Texts that emphasize scientific data and geomorphological topics can all too easily be weighed down by scientific jargon, but Kimmel maintains a level of informality and openness that is both effective and appropriate. A love for the land and a desire to make its history known transcends the text itself. In that sense, Kimmel's book is reminiscent of the regional narratives penned by Dan Flores. Still, this book is not without its problems. The scientific reviews are extraordinarily complete, but Kimmel hurries through and over-simplifies the historical narratives. [End Page 79] For example, he mentions that the Waco Indians "farmed the alluvial terraces above the [Brazos] river and maintained a village first reported by the Spanish explorers in 1541" (96). This statement is either poorly worded or inaccurate. In his travels across what would become Texas, Coronado did cross the main stem or tributaries of the Brazos River, and sources suggest that Coronado might have encountered a group associated with the Waco Indians. However, the Waco were not living anywhere in Texas in 1541.

Despite occasional problems with the historical text, Jim Kimmel's Exploring the Brazos River: From Beginning to End affords a very good introduction to a system that is both complex and understudied. The book is well-written and well-researched. Moreover, it succeeds in making the riverscape a place that can be experienced on a personal level. Kimmel ends every chapter with a section that tells readers how and where to engage this riparian history. Consequently, this text should be mandatory reading for anybody interested in the waterways of Texas.

Kenna Lang Archer
Texas Tech University
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