Old Man River

Starred review from July 1, 2013
Older than the Atlantic Ocean, fought over by the French, Spanish, and English, birthplace of Washington and Grant’s military careers—the Mississippi River, as Schneider tells it, is the central character in the story of America. In this stunning tale, the author of The Adirondacks documents the rich history of the Mighty Mississipp and its watershed. From the otherworldly funerary structures built by early American peoples to the booming, bawdy river towns that arose in the wake of the nascent slave trade, and from the struggles between Native Americans and the first European explorers to the war that almost rent the nation asunder, the Mississippi has played host to myriad acts of creation and destruction that have shaped American life. Migrants, speculators, and slaves have called it home, and their legacies live on in realms as diverse as heavy industry and jazz. The river stretches from Minnesota to the Gulf of Mexico, and Schneider guides readers all the way from geological antiquity to the Deepwater Horizon oil spill. With such an expert hand on the tiller, Old Man River is an astonishing journey. 60 b&w halftones. Agent: David Kuhn, Kuhn Projects.

June 15, 2013
Another chockablock, environmentally focused, ambitious volume from Schneider (Bonnie and Clyde: The Lives Behind the Legend, 2010, etc.). To keep his portrait of the mighty Mississippi from becoming unnavigable, the author alternates chapters of dense chronological history with tales of canoe meanderings along the river with his son. This personal approach allows the author to skim over the stultifying details of the numerous wars along the river's shores between white colonizers and Native American inhabitants, as well as most Mississippi-related Civil War battles. Schneider aims to seize the river's essence: what it meant to the people who lived near it and used it for transportation, livelihood, industry and pleasure. The Mississippi watershed is not the longest river in the U.S. (that distinction goes to the Missouri), but it feeds tributaries to 41 percent of the continental U.S. Moreover, the author delineates fondly, the Mississippi has proved instrumental in prodding the nation to its ultimate destiny. The river was the gateway to new territories in the West; their settlement sparked the debate over slave and free states that was one of the causes of the Civil War. People living alongside the river crafted the nation's defining cultural forms, including African-American jazz and blues and Mark Twain's salty prose. Schneider marks the Mississippi's slow transformation from a watering hole for mastodons and the Native American makers of effigy mounds to a staging ground for the explorations of first the Spanish and then the French, all looking for a way to the Pacific. The murky journey to the present day is not exactly merry, fraught by disasters both natural and man-made, but at least the federal government's passage of the Clean Water Act of 1972 provided tools for better stewardship in the future--though the 2010 BP spill suggests those tools are laid aside as often as wielded. A wild ride well worth taking, though readers may want to portage around some of the narrative rapids.

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April 1, 2013

"Ol' Man River" (as the immortal Kern/Hammerstein song calls it) has been rolling along for millennia, and Schneider (The Adirondacks) here starts with its geologic origins. From the Paleolithic tribes that sailed its waters 15,000 years ago, to French and Spanish exploration and Civil War battles, to its role today as the world's busiest waterway, this is the story of how the Mississippi has shaped America--and the world.

Copyright 2013 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

August 1, 2013
Nonfiction lovers with eclectic tastes and readers bored by a single-discipline approach will love Schneider's multiple-angle portrait of the Mississippi watershed. The territory Schneider studies is what some dismiss as flyover country, but what fascinating stories flyover country has to tell! The journey begins with geology and anthropology, exploring how the rivers that drain this huge watershed developed and what we know of the area's earliest civilizations. Schneider narrates the first European ventures into the watershed, and the roles of the Spanish, French, British, and ultimately Americansas well as Native Americans, particularly the Iroquois, with whom colonizers sometimes partnered and sometimes battledin this new land. Key Civil War operations to control the Mississippi are vividly portrayed; the book's final section examines technology: steamboats, bridges, railroads, and, ultimately, efforts by the Army Corps of Engineers to tame the river, which killed so many in its 1920s floods. Throughout, there are bits of memoir, as Schneider sets out on one of the watershed's rivers by kayak or motorboat. Appropriate for most libraries.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2013, American Library Association.)