I downloaded this audiobook because I was hoping for a fun ride. I mean, how could it not be? Feral hippos have overtaken parts of the Mississippi and there is a gang of gunslingers running around on hippos. This should have been like a B-movie creature feature! I wanted blood and revenge and dismemberment by hippo! Unfortunately that is not what I got. 

This is a pretty short novella, the audiobook was only 4 1/2 hours. But honestly it felt like I was listening for 45 hours. The first three hours are a long and tedious introduction to the members of Houndstooth's gang. One or two of the characters also use non-binary pronouns for some reason. I am not opposed to this being used in a book but since it wasn't explained or introduced it was very confusing. And the character's name is Hero, which isn't really a name at all. I had a really hard time following that because you have a not-name and a not-pronoun being used constantly. The history was tedious, I really want to get to something interesting and it seemed like it was never going to happen. It took three hours just to find out what job the gang had been hired for!

When we finally did get to the action it was abrupt and didn't make much sense. The author shows a very strong lack of knowledge about how dams and rivers work. The lack of knowledge about hippo physiology I can excuse since it was a creature feature. But you don't know that water naturally runs downhill? And that dams are built upstream to create larger, still bodies of water? Dams don't have gates for boats to travel through, that is a loch. All of these questions quickly took me out of the story. It all ended with not much blood, not much gore, and a shocking lack of hippos. This was supposed to be about hippos and I feel like we hardly saw them in action.

Also, there was a short history of how hippos came to be so rampant in Louisiana at the end of the book. It explained what "The Harriet" was, which frankly I was not able to piece together through the whole novella. It might have been better to have that at the beginning. This history says that in this alternate history that Lincoln never got around to the Emancipation Proclamation because he was busy with hippo legislation. So, if the Civil War never happened and the slaves were not freed, then how did you have so much acceptance of such a wide array of people in Louisiana (which was a slave holding state)? We have Hispanic people, African American people, non-binary people, bisexual people, feminists...all in this gang and everyone accepts it, doesn't mention it, and remembers everyone else's pronouns flawlessly. That is a head-scratcher right there. Slavery is still a thing but we're embracing non-binary pronouns. It was weird and nonsensical. The best alternate histories need to make sense.

This is a quirky mix of historical anecdotes with a bit of the author’s personal travels, endearing if not particularly cohesive. The geographical scope is quite broad, encompassing areas of the Mississippi River basin quite removed from the river itself (40% of the U.S. is in the Mississippi basin, though the points Schneider writes about are either along the river or east of it). Early sections cover the river basin’s geological history, and then move into Native American history mostly via archaeology, and the section on colonial explorations and warfare is extensive; we’re more than halfway through the book before the United States as a country is born. Because the book is not long and the time period covered is, the author seems to just tell us the stories that suit his fancy, which produce an interesting mix. The portions dealing with Native American history have been done better in, for instance, 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus, though on the other hand I think this is the most in-depth treatment of the French colonial/exploratory presence in the future U.S. that I’ve ever seen, which speaks to their treatment in most histories as no more than nebulous antagonists off in the woods somewhere.

My favorite part was the 60-page “Life on the Mississippi” segment set between the Revolution and Civil War, covering boat travel up and down the river both before and after the introduction of steamboats, and also river pirates and the like. The Civil War section seems disproportionately long at around 40 pages, and was less interesting to me, and then the book wraps up with a couple of chapters on the extensive dams and other artificial changes made to the river since and their environmental impacts. Long story short, alterations to make the river easier to navigate and reduce yearly flooding also reduce the sediment settling at the mouth of the river to the point that Louisiana is losing a huge amount of land area every year, while major floods are even more frequent and destructive.

There are interspersed chapters about the author’s various travels on and around the river, which are not particularly eventful but are clearly meaningful to him, and add some emotional dimension to the book. Also, on one trip he takes his teenaged son and they run along the top of a train stopped by the side of the river, which makes him a super cool dad.

Overall, this book is kind of scattershot – the author is pretty clearly just relating whatever historical anecdotes are most interesting to him, without making any attempts at being comprehensive, and it would be easy to nitpick what’s included and what’s not. However, it’s pretty well-written and as light supplemental history and travel reading it’s perfectly fine.

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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 telling of the history of the Mississippi and steamboats.  I enjoyed his reminiscences of his time working on the boats as well as him going back years later and going through the changes to the river and the towns along the river as well as the men he knew then.  I liked the Native American stories he told.  I liked his cynicism and tongue-in-cheek humor as he tells his story.  Worth reading today as it tells a time that has passed.

Biographies/Memoirs

6. Mississippi to Madrid: Memoir of a Black American in the Abraham Lincoln Brigade by James Yates - first book I read in my first history class in college. That semester the class (HISTORY 101 for History Majors) was spent learning all about the Spanish Civil War and this was what my professor started with as a bridge between American history and the conflict in Spain. Many POC who fought in the Lincoln Brigade would go on to serve in WWII and had more experience fighting Germany than their white counterparts because they had already seen the destruction the Nazis could do in war via Spain. Also a theme in the book is living life under Jim Crow and then going abroad to fight for another people's liberation. Can't recommend this one enough.

7. Night by Elie Wiesel - should be required reading for every high school freshman in the US. And every member of the US political realm.

8. How Dare the Sun Rise: Memoirs of a War Child by Sandra Uwiringiyimana - ditto the sentiments in number 7.

9. Call the Midwife series by Jennifer Worth - while I do love the show, the memoirs of a mid-wife/district nurse in the poorest area of London after the war is a must read, especially in light of how the NHS is being used as a pawn in the Brexit/PM race. The second book doesn't deal with pregnancy or childbirth but does deal with people who are otherwise invisible.

10. Plenty of Time When We Get Home (Love and Recovery in the Aftermath of War) by Kayla Williams - Kayla and Brian were friends, meeting through different times while both served in Afghanistan. Brian was involved in roadside bombing but nobody could know the depths of his injuries until much later. Kayla and Brian eventually fell in love and got married, but dealing with their own and each other's PTSD and Brian's physical injuries were challenging. Kayla and Brian are now working in the VA, hoping to create change in culture and attitude as well as policies that hinder a veteran's progress. I follow Kayla on Twitter and she is just a great person to highlight how women veterans are faring in the VA and what we can all do to help.