Dreaming the Mississippi.

Dreaming the Mississippi

Katherine Fisher

University of Missouri Press 

2910 LeMone Boulevard, Columbia, MO 65201

0826216862 $18.95

Written by National Mississippi River Museum and Aquarium consultant Katherine Fisher, Dreaming the Mississippi is part memoir, part cultural reflection, part celebration of the mighty Mississippi. From the author's daily life in a house so close to the Mississippi banks that each spring she must open her basement doors to accept the regular floods, to tongue-in-cheek accounts of river rats and towboat pilots, to tales of desperate sandbagging against unruly flood tides, river hangouts, choice waterfront taverns, and more. A chapter especially devoted to the river's mouth considers not only the natural gulf itself, but the gulf as a metaphor for the gulf between engineers and naturalists, America's haves and its have-nots. A handful of black-and-white photographs, and somber reflections upon the outcome to Hurricane Katrina's wrath round out this reverent reflection upon not only the celebrated Mississippi, but also humankind's inextricable bond to the natural world.