There were a plethora of books published to celebrate the four hundredth anniversary of the Jamestown landings and this fascinating volume, which claims that the James River is where the history of the American nation began, is one of them. Despite acknowledging the diverse origins of the settlers and the influence of other colonies, Virginia is placed centre stage by Deans as achieving a number of “firsts”: the first representative government in America, the landing point of the first Africans and the site of the country's original cash crop. The book begins with the geological creation of the river and an examination of its pre-European history. Much of this description can be found in numerous other textbooks and popular histories, but here it is interspersed with some real gems of commentary, such as mention of esteemed anthropologist and expert on the Powhatan tribe Helen Rowntree's reaction to eating tuckahoe.

Deans sticks to the accepted historical narrative for much of the early history of the European settlement of the region, for example crediting Richard Hakluyt with “changing the world” and interesting the English in North America. Of course Hakluyt's role is crucial, but it would have been useful to see an analysis of the importance of translations of European travel narratives into English in the late sixteenth century and the less-known exploration tracts in the early seventeenth. John Smith, too, is uncritically given his place as a keystone of the American nation as Deans claims that if Smith had been hanged by his compatriots, the Virginia enterprise would have surely failed. The telling of the story of Smith's kidnap and mythic rescue by Pocahontas is rightly done using Smith's own words, but this highlights a major flaw in the book: the volume is completely devoid of footnote referencing, even where direct quotations have been used. This makes it extremely frustrating for the historian and difficult to recommend to the student, which is a shame because some entertaining “pop culture” comparisons, such as Smith and Newport being compared to Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, could have made this book attractive and thought-provoking for undergraduates.

After a hundred pages or so I feel that the book begins to stray away from its intention. This, after all, is a history of the river rather than just another telling of the history of Virginia. But Deans describes the development of the tobacco plantations along the James without any attempt to analyse their geographical and social significance. The story of the river is periodically brought back into focus, such as in entertaining descriptions of a slave burial site beside the river that show the slaves' hopes of beginning their journey along the river to the spirit world. Perhaps more problematically, Thomas Jefferson's desire for representative government is also related to the culture of his riverside plantation. After Independence comes the golden age of river travel with boats taking their wares as far west as Lynchburg, but this receives merely a couple of paragraphs of narrative before returning to a conventional discussion of the history of the formation of the Constitution.

In his conclusion, Deans describes the way Americans think of their history today, the romantic illusion of the plantations along the James River, and he asks whether the four hundredth anniversary should be a time of celebration or mourning. In answer to that question he pleads for a celebration of the inclusiveness of the United States, although the story of the preceding four centuries does not offer as much hope as Deans seems to think. Overall this is a difficult book to recommend to scholars because of the lack of referencing. That aside, it strays from its aim of telling the story of the river and into the more general and well-known story of the founding of the nation. The interdisciplinary nature of the sources used does make the book attractive, however, as do the occasional asides and gems of information found in few other history textbooks. The genuine attempt to include native sources, including the views of twenty-first-century natives, is laudable. For historians of the United States or of Virginia specifically, this book should be readable and entertaining rather than a challenging addition to the bookshelf.