Rivalry, the French philosopher of science Michel Serres (L'Arts des ponts, 2006) reminds us, comes from the Latin rivalis, which denotes entities (people, cities, and countries) located on opposite sides of the same river. In this sense, Nick Thorpe's The Danube: A Journey Upriver from the Black Sea to the Black Forest could be easily read as an inventory of rivalries embedded in and remembered by the Danube, which flows through ten countries and often serves as a border between two or more nation-states. This reading would not be incompatible with those of official history textbooks, which tend to narrate Central and Eastern Europe through the rise and fall of a succession of empires, from the Romans through the Habsburgs and the Ottomans all the way to the Soviet Union. The Danube was central to all of these empires, and Thorpe is admittedly fascinated with the traces of rivalries associated with them, whether materialized in hidden memorials or in highly visible nuclear plants. However, as Serres points out, rivers are peculiar political actors: unlike walls and fences, they connect as much as they separate. This suggests that other readings of the Danube—and of Thorpe's book—might be possible, and more appropriate.

Nick Thorpe is the East and Central European correspondent of the BBC, and his book about the Danube is more the travelogue of a seasoned journalist than an academic study of a river. Still, I find The Danube of high academic interest as it can be considered an engaging experiment in storytelling, in at least two ways. The first has to do with the refusal of the East–West divide in the geographical center of Europe. As Thorpe clearly states in the introduction, the purpose of his book was neither to celebrate the triumph of capitalism and liberal democracy, nor to romanticize the East (xviii–xix). Rather, by traveling upstream from the Black Sea to the Black Forest, the main aim was to focus on lives, patterns, and practices that connect, rather than separate diverse areas related in one way or another to the Danube. The political significance of such an undertaking should not be underestimated. Thorpe's journey, documented in a careful and entertaining way, took place between March 2011 and March 2012. At the time, perhaps not even Thorpe could imagine that the stories he had collected about the everyday struggles of Muslims in both the former East and the former West, the courage that thousands of families took to risk everything they once had in order to settle in a safe country, the shadows of war that linger on long after the weapons and those they had killed have vanished, would so soon reappear on the front pages of our daily newspapers. I happened to read Thorpe's chapters about Serbia, Croatia, Hungary, and Austria in September 2015, when the recent refugee crisis reached its peak, and I could not help but see the centuries of migration in and through the region as a single flow. Any attempt to stop this flow—with walls, fences, or other means—would be as foolish as trying to stop the Danube itself.

The second way of reading The Danube as an experiment in storytelling is related to the role of nature. Thorpe's stories, organized into fourteen chapters and illustrated by thirty-two black-and-white photographs, are populated not only by people and their built environments, but also by a wide variety of fish, trees, stones, insects, and different bodies of water. These and the other nonhuman entities that Thorpe encounters along his way are not simply the natural ornaments of his cultural account of a river, but active participants in the problematization of the relation between nature and culture as such. Similar to the refusal of the East–West divide, Thorpe's refusal of the nature–culture divide has important political implications that point beyond the case at hand. As sociologists of science Michael Schillmeier and Wiebke Pohler have argued in The Sociological Review (2011), environmental controversies such as the decades-long debates around the construction of the Gabčíkovo–Nagymaros Waterworks or the rehabilitation of the Danube delta are nothing less than indicators of different ways of imagining Europe.

The Danube is a vast archive of previous—often disastrous—attempts to imagine and reimagine Europe, but it is also a great source of inspiration for those who are willing and able to listen. Nick Thorpe is a professional listener, and his book is a wonderful demonstration of how to listen well to a river at a time when stories about separation are once again getting louder than stories about connection.