Life on the Mississippi [Tantor]

De: Mark Twain

Narrado por: Michael Prichard

A brilliant amalgam of remembrance and reportage, by turns satiric, celebratory, nostalgic, and melancholy, Life on the Mississippi evokes the great river that Mark Twain knew as a boy and young man and the one he revisited as a mature and successful author.

Written between the publication of his two greatest novels, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Twain's rich portrait of the Mississippi marks a distinctive transition in the life of the river and the nation, from the boom years preceding the Civil War to the sober times that followed it.

Public Domain (P)2010 Tantor

I wouldn’t misunderstand memoir as a genre if all memoirs are written like this

Five villains of this narrative:
1. Sir Walter Scott, basically the reason for slavery according to Mark Twain.
2. Mr Brown, who Twain has murdered 17 times in one night worth of dreams and made a comeback in a faked prisoner conversion letter
3. Tourists with no original emotions parroting each other including Mrs Trollope and Captain Basil Hill, whose Mississippi travelogues Twain has rage read.
4. Mark Twain, who got an esteemed pilot license 21 years before writing the book and has milked that license ever since.
5. Railroads, who substituted the romantic steamboat.

Five heroes in this narrative.
1. The Mississippi River. The way Twain described the sunrise and sunset at the Mississippi River🥹
2.Steamboats, even if they are slow and could explode anytime.
3. Mr Bixby.
4. Sewerage system.
5. New England and the northwest unironically. But I get it, it is Twain’s idealized version of education and justice system etc

Jokes aside, this memoir has such an interesting structure, the middle one third portion is what I expected going in, towns and cities along the southern Mississippi between St. Louis and New Orleans. But he started narrative with his steam boat pilot apprentice days, which tbh lost me a bit in the beginning but I know why it is narratively importantly upon finishing the book. More surprisingly, he did not end the narrative at New Orleans. Instead he spend the latter one third of the book going upstream and ended at the starting point of the river in Minnesota. I think this narrative structure is brilliance.

One story in the middle of the boom Twain included was the story from a German morgue dude. He murdered the people who murdered his wife and had some money hide in Napoleon Arkansas. I went from horrified at the German morgue dude’s tragedy, to doubting the validity of his story, to laughing to tears when Twain and two fellow boatsmen immediately justifying keeping the money the German morgue dude claimed he hid in napoleon and bequeathed Twain with the task of bringing it to some other guy, then to shock and emotional when Twain revealed that the town of Napoleon was submerged by Mississippi, the town where he learned his brother died in a steam boat explosion. Twain is such a master story teller.

Get your river pilot license for the Mississippi!

If this book accomplishes anything is that it will teach you just how hard it is to learn the Mississippi River well enough to be a riverboat pilot, something Mark Twain did achieved and wished he had returned to later in life.

Road Trip Book - Though on a River

Long before the advent of road trip books like John Steinbeck's, Travels with Charlie, or Jack Kerouac's, On the Road, there was Mark Twain's - Life on the Mississippi. This is a two part story - one dealing with Twain's years as a riverboat pilot on the Mississippi, and the second part focusing on his nostalgia journey back to the river twenty years later.

The river serves as metaphor for the rapidly changing industrial landscape of mid-19th Century North America. Twain encapsulates the metamorphoses through vignettes and interviews that capture "what-was" and "what-is."

As good in audio as in text, this story will captivate historians and Big Muddy aficionados. It does tend to drag towards the end, though for a purpose. I wouldn't let that keep me from recommending this book. Just listen to it when you have plenty of leisure time or you're on the road again in the Midwest.