Old Times on the Mississippi

Before he was Mark Twain, he was a kid from Missouri with stars in his eyes and the muddy Mississippi running through his blood. This is the memoir of young Samuel Clemens's apprenticeship as a riverboat pilot, those halcyon years when he learned to read the river's moods like a language and discovered that the water held more secrets than any man could master in a lifetime. Twain recreates the vanished world of the steamboats with staggering vividness: the cockpit's electric atmosphere, the rough poetry of the deckhands, the hair-raising moments when a sandbar or a sudden current could kill everyone aboard. There's a deep current of loss here too, even in the humor. The author knew the glory days were numbered even as he lived them, that the railroad would soon render riverboats quaint. This is America remembered before it forgot how to be wild, written by a man who understood that memory itself is a kind of fiction we tell ourselves to stay human.