Samuel

I suppose I listened to the hype but I thought there might be some of Mark Twain in his prime here. Never mind that the editors' introduction is half an hour too long. Not his fault. But this is that self-impressed, dull Mark Twain who wrote all those books that aren't classics. There is little charm, no humor, and a void of interesting stories.
Apparently he had an idea that if a biography isn't sequential, it must be special. However, he didn't publish this book. It just came out a century or so after his death. So whatever the editors and publishers had in mind, this isn't a book Twain insisted on publishing. And one thing I certainly learned about Twain is that, if there was a chance to make money without embarrassing himself, he would publish. But wait, I already knew that. I don't think I learned anything new about the guy--or the writer.
Only historians of U.S, Grant would find huge hunks of this monster interesting. A lot of it I remember reading elsewhere. But most of all, if Twain wasn't writing humorously, he wasn't Twain for me.