Carter was a prominent journalist of his era and lived near the Mississippi River in Greenville, Mississippi. This book takes on the task of describing much of the human history with the Mississippi, or at least the part that began when Europeans arrived in North America. The book is interesting mostly as a time capsule. Carter writes confidently about how man (and it is always men at that time) had conquered and tamed the river and about the unquestioned good of every economic activity along the river, like oil and gas exploration.

A generation later, we have a better understanding of the costs of our efforts to tame the river and to exploit every natural resource along its way, but if you want to know how we got here, this book is a pretty good introduction. I'm also not a big fan of his writing style, at least in this book; the prose is bloated and there are some factual errors that bothered me. I'm also pretty sure that some of the photographs are mislabeled. ( )