Now and then we had a hope that if we lived and were good, God would permit us to be pirates.Life on the Mississippi ~~ Mark TwainDisjointed ~~ surprisingly so, outrageous ~~ definitely, hilarious ~~ that goes without saying, fascinating ~~ obviously, all of these adjectives describe Mark Twain's Life on the Mississippi, a meandering tour through a vanished America. Thru a series of autobiographical sketches describing his life on the Mississippi River, Twain both entertains and educates his aud...

Life on the Mississippi by Mark TwainI'm so very glad I read this. I've been meaning to read more by Twain for decades of course, but my move to Missouri motivated me enough to finally choose this one. I thought it might be a bit of a task, leavened by some history and some wit. It was the reverse. Lots of wit, lots of history, very accessible prose (only a few bits of slang were unfamiliar, and only a few sentences were structured in such a way that I had trouble following them), and almost no...

Another book I've read over and over--It's free on Kindle in the old edition, which is fun to read because of its authentic touches. America's 1880s are my current decade of choice, having spent years mired in research about the period, and Life on the Mississippi captures the rapid change in this country that took place after the Civil War, as it changed from a land of bucolic wilderness filled with independent workingmen to one of safer, duller regulated organized industrialization and automat...

I really struggled with this one. It's a long wordy book that is basically about a river and nothing apart from the river. It's a very detailed account of said river.This wasn't what I was expecting at all, it is however another classic off the list!

Life on the Mississippi, Mark Twain Life on the Mississippi (1883) is a memoir by Mark Twain of his days as a steamboat pilot on the Mississippi River before the American Civil War, and also a travel book, recounting his trip along the Mississippi River from St. Louis to New Orleans many years after the War. The book begins with a brief history of the river as reported by Europeans and Americans, beginning with the Spanish explorer Hernando de Soto in 1542. It continues with anecdotes of Twain's...

Back in the day before pesky child labour laws stole the liberty of a hard dreaming child to go forth and make their way in the world, running the risk of boiler explosions, sinking paddle-steamers, and night time collisions. Young Samuel Clemens worked his way up to the dizzying heights of river pilot, stole another pilot's nom de plume, "Mark Twain!" was a depth reading to help the pilot not to run the ship aground and so was well on his way to becoming a writer.He reflects at one a moment whe...

So often my reading seems to unintentionally reflect upon itself. I’ve been doing a very slow read of the Michael Slater biography of Dickens and had finished the account of his first American tour when I started this after a friend asked me to read it with her. Almost immediately I encountered a mention of Dickens and then references to two earlier British travel writers, Captain Marryat and Captain Basil Hall. Dickens read the works of the two captains in preparation for his own trip to the U....

Twain on the river as a kid. Twain back on the river again as a sneaky pete writer. I wanted to like this book, which is why, I suppose, I hung in for 350-odd pages before setting it aside. The book is entertaining intermittantly and occasionally sharp and funny but it meanders. I should probably have my keyboard revoked for using the word 'meander' in a review about a book about a river, but clearly I can't help myself. Seriously, tho, Twain needed an editor with a heavy hand for this one.

I didn't finish this book - I stopped around page 220 in my edition.As much as I love Mark Twain, and as much as he can write...the book is about a river. The first few chapters are about Twain's days as an apprentice steamboat pilot, and they are interesting and fun to to read. After them, however, begin a series of chapters regarding how the towns on the Mississippi have changed, what European travelers of old said of them, what the different prices of shipping through rail or train were, and

Like the river it commemorates, this book has its long stretches, its vistas of tedium, its drowsy numbness-inducing disquisitions on the life nautical; but every once in a while you come across a passage like this:"The face of the water, in time, became a wonderful book--a book that was a dead language to the uneducated passenger, but which told its mind to me without reserve, delivering its most cherished secrets as clearly as if it uttered them with a voice. And it was not a book to be thrown...

I first read this book fifty years ago when I was in high school, and I recalled Twain's account of his days as a Mississippi steamboat pilot's apprentice as a work of great humor and style with quintessentially American themes, equal in power to Huckleberry Finn. A recent re-reading has left me both gratified and disappointed: gratified because Twain's history and description of the ever-changing Mississippi and his account of his life as a young river pilot are just good as I remembered them,

Life on the Mississippi is like a time capsule as Twain revisits many of his earlier haunts and remarks on how the towns have changed. The book is equal parts travelogue, history, nostalgia and yarns.I really love this book even though it was written some 130 years ago.Twain exhibits his characteristic wit throughout the book but he is more often wistful. I feel that Twain exhibits a great intuition for when his audience might be getting bored with the subject at hand and he is able to quickly w...

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 his younger days working on steamboats from Cairo, Illinois to New Orleans. Only the latter part of the Appendix I felt was a little superfluous and out-of-place. It pains me to say that as a Mark Twa...

Life on the Mississippi by Mark Twain was first published in 1883 and describes his apprenticeship and success as a Mississippi River pilot and then returning to the river more than twenty years later. At its heart this is a travel book, but really more than that this is a portrait of America in the 19th century. Told with Twain’s inimitable wit and charm, this contains histrionic and speculative facts, half-truths, wild exaggerations and tall tales. Written by anyone else, this would have been

From now on when I think of Mark Twain he will have Grover Gardner's voice, no disrespect intended to the late Hal Holbrook who did such a wonderful job portraying him for many years. This is just the second audio book I have listened to by Gardner and his voice has become familiar to me. I grew up in a Mississippi River state, but nothing was ever made of it. We had another river in our town, The Wisconsin River, "The Hardest Working River in the World," so called because it had more hydro ele...

I love Mark Twain, I really do. The Adventures of Tom Sawyer as well as the Adventures of Huckleberry Finn are just classic. He was a satirist (a brilliant one at that). He was a story-teller. He was so good at being a satirical orator that he made a living of it! He travelled the world. He was a celebrity if there ever was one.Maybe it was because I read his fiction first, maybe it was because I idolized him, but good god this was a hard book to get through for me. This wasn't his first book. I...

And, mind you, emotions are among the toughest things in the world to manufacture out of whole cloth; it is easier to manufacture seven facts than one emotion. This is an awkward book to review, since it consists of so many, varied sections. Yet it can be neatly divided between the first third and the remaining portion. After a few brief chapters about the mighty river and its history, the beginning section focuses on Twain’s young days as a steersman aboard Mississippi River steamboats. Thes

What I wish: Oh!, to live my life as a steamboat captain on the Mississippi in the nineteenth century of the year of our Lord! How I'm living: Alas!, to have been born in Kentucky in the 1980s!WIW: To float down the Mississippi, smoking a corn cob pipe, piratical, unruly, and barbarous!HIL: Sitting at a desk, cultivating carpal tunnel as a professional button pusher and microwaving leftovers for lunch.WIW: To take my turn at the helm, dodging rocks and aiming for smaller crafts, yelling out "qua...

I have a love-hate relationship with this book. When I read it originally in my schooldays, I couldn't digest half of it. When I read it subsequently as an adult, I loved the steamboat experience but hated the patently untruthful yarns and the rather long-winded expositions. I will rate Mark Twain's fiction above his factual prose anytime.

Memoir, travel, history, humor, fiction served up in deceptively folksy prose (which is in fact as sharp as it is funny) to evoke the 19th century Mississippi in all its glory and heartbreak. Admittedly there were a few too many tall tales for my taste or they went on too long, yarns not being my favorite reading, but I concede their necessity in creating the larger truth here. Evocative and endlessly gripping and droll.