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I found the descriptions of the Mississippi distractingly boring to be honest.
This was a good book and very funny about being a steam boat captain. Really opened my eyes to how hard it is.
By the mark. Mark one! Mark twain! Half-twain. Mark three. Mark four. Deep four. Ocean D-e-e-p.
I read this for a class; or better yet, I was supposed to. I didn't finish it because I couldn't make myself care about what it as like to be the pilot of a steamboat. I pushed through the first three chapters, read chapter four, and only skimmed the rest so I would be able to pass the online quiz I had. I found the lengthy details to be insufferably boring.
A delightful account of life in the 50s, the 1850s, as Twain apprentices as a "cub" to a riverboat pilot. I found this book thoroughly delightful, but I could just as easily see how other readers might find his detailed account of the mighty Mississippi too detailed or boring. I found it neither and delighted in every detail and anecdote.Early on, he writes of how the captain would remark, "This is Six-Mile Point, this is Nine-Mile Point" but when quizzed on it later, Twain had no idea he was su...
"Old Times on the Mississippi" reminded me of a miniature, less absorbing Moby Dick, with a river instead of a whale. Humorous tales of heroics and failures mixed with Twain's firsthand experience as a pilot/cub, giving me an appreciation for an artform I hadn't thought about much before now. Huckleberry Finn inspired my love for rafting and the river, but after finishing this I cannot confess the same inspiration, but rather a melancholy that steamboating and all of it's intricacies have gone t...
Interesting to History buffsThis autobiographical work was used as a rough draft for Mark's Life On The Mississippi. It pulls the reader along by the lapels to the end. I have read must of Mark's published works over the past 60 years, always imagining I could put myself in his shadow. No other American humorist can equal his sense of "style".
I liked it more than Huckleberry Finn. :)I learned more from it.
Twain's recollections of having been a riverboat captain in his youth. A highly technical job at the time.
They call out mark twain to gauge the depth of the water....he spent a lot of time on boats...he heard mark twain a lot...he wrote about it....OH MY GOD THATS WHY HIS NAME IS MARK TWAIN