Life on the Mississippi
Format: hardcover
Publish date: 2006
Publisher: Folio Society, The
Pages no: 384
Edition language: English
Written in 1882, Life on the Mississippi is a product of its time but we need this because it shows us where we come from, hopefully getting better but not always. This is Twain's history as well as a history of steamboats, the Mississippi River, and the growth of the U.S. I enjoyed Twain's tellin...
Recently, I participated in a writers' workshop. It took place in an inn that actually floats on the Missouri River. For five days, I was to be hypnotized by the river's ever-flowing current. I thought of Mark Twain, an author whose books I have never read. What better time could there be to acquain...
It seems to me that Mark Twain is most effective when he is barnstorming or barnburning with a fire and brimstone bastardization of the masses. How can I say that? How can Mark Twain write a long, largely uninspiring account of the life and river which defined him as a steam captain?
The parts I enjoyed, I enjoyed greatly. The parts I did not, I very much did not. My only criticism of this book is it's amazing propensity to ramble. Where Twain rambles into a story, it's captivating. Where he rambles to describe some endless feature of a forgotten passage of the great river, not ...
By turns, this book served as a travelogue, a history of the Mississippi, and as a source for Twain's reminiscences of his life as a steamboat pilot on the same river in the antebellum era. Of all these functions, I enjoyed most reading about Twain's return to the Mississippi in the early 1880s and...
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