Life on the Mississippi by Rinker Buck

 

Title:  Life on the Mississippi

Author:  Rinker Buck

Narrated by:  Jason Culp

Publisher: Simon & Schuster Audio

Length: Approximately 15 hours and 21 minutes

Source: Review Copy from Simon & Schuster.  Thank-you!

 If you had unlimited time, where would you like to explore in the world?

 Rinker Buck is a fascinating historian.  While he does research as other historians do, he also likes to fully live out the experience that he is researching.  His previous book, The Oregon Trail, is one of my favorite books.  He experienced pioneer living by crossing America on the Oregon Trial in a prairie wagon.

 In Life on the Mississippi, Rinker Buck explores another great part of our history that was a prime way our country was settled and grew economically, flatboat travel down the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers.  Buck starts his journey upstream of Pittsburg and he goes all of the way to New Orleans.  This books tells the story of his journey with helpers along the way.  The river has changed a lot since the nineteenth century and Buck has many near misses with barges.  He stops at different towns and tells the stories of those towns.  He also fills in with different related points in history as well. He talked about slavery and the removal of Native Americans.  He also includes his political views which may be off-putting to some people.  He spent a lot of time talking about his broken ribs and seemed very proud of breaking them several times in his life.  It just sounded painful to me.

 I like how it looked at this point of history of the regular people who used the rivers to travel to new areas of the United States and to ship goods.  I didn’t realize just how important it was for commerce in the founding of our country and even now.

 It also is sad how trashed the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers are now and how they are set up for commercial and not leisure craft.  He did have some not nice things to say about the Army Corp, but some of it was misunderstanding of what the Army Corp does.  Its purpose is to keep the river navigable and to prevent flooding.  It’s purpose is not to clean up the river and make it beautiful. 

 I listened to the audiobook while my husband Ben read the physical book.  We both enjoyed the journey.  The one thing both of us wondered about was how blunt he was talking about his friends (and not friends) that were on the journey with him.  He was not always the nicest in his descriptions.  It was fun to read it at the same time and share our thoughts.    Jason Culp was a good narrator of the audiobook.  I did miss Rinker Buck as the narrator.  He narrated his previous book, The Oregon Trail.

 Life on the Mississippi is a good adventure story and an interesting way to learn history.