“The Mississippi is well worth reading about,” Mark Twain wrote back in 1883. “It is not a commonplace river, but on the contrary is in all ways remarkable.”
I agree, though I’ve always found this a rather self-promotional first sentence for a book titled Life on the Mississippi.
Show, don’t tell, Mark—didn’t you get the memo?
At any rate, readers are in luck this season. A year ago, I joked on Twitter that I hoped some other Mississippi-focused book might appear around the same time as mine—that way someone might write a joint review. I couldn’t have guessed then that there’d be a small shelf’s-worth of books arriving this spring and summer.
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