2013 read #121: Old Man River by Paul Schneider.

Old Man River: The Mississippi River in North American History by Paul Schneider
334 pages
Published 2013
Read from September 18 to September 19
Rating: ★★★½ out of 5

The subtitle, I think, fudges the truth a bit. The Mississippi itself would seem ample subject for a popular history such as this, but Old Man River overtops its banks and pulls the entire Mississippi watershed within its purview, from the dubiously dated habitation of the Meadowcroft Shelter in Pennsylvania to the Deepwater Horizon incident, from Clovis sites at the headwaters of the Cimarron to an extended interlude among the Iroquois and Huron in future New York and Ontario. A better subtitle might be "Selected Incidents and Anecdotes from the Middle Half of the Continental United States." Not content with the scope of that subject matter, Schneider inserts tales of his own kayak-and-taxicab excursions throughout the drainage basin. Schneider's prose is journalistic, a fast read but hardly poetic. The likes of Rebecca Solnit, Edward Abbey, and Ellen Meloy have spoiled me; Schneider's excursions seem pedestrian, banal, contrived, lacking the shades of meaning and insight found in better travel writing, touristy even -- altogether pointless against the backdrop of exploration and genocide that he breezes through. (The sad litany of colonial wars against native nations, told with such heartbreaking intensity throughout Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee, gets compressed here into a literal bullet-list, a mere two pages long.)

On the whole, though, Old Man River is enjoyable, if undemanding. When not briskly summarized, the chapters of actual history are absorbing, reviving my dormant interest in early American history. Picking through the bibliography yielded several titles I want to look into as soon as my current library backlog (a box of thirteen more books, which I keep resupplying faster than I consume) is down to a more manageable stock.