One of my favorite Twain books. He describes "reading the river" so well.
Masterful evocation of times gone, and places, vanished. Some of the tales tend to have "color added" in the Twain tradition, but they are invariably interesting. Twain's warnings of the futility of taming the mighty river will sound surprisingly familiar in light of the events of 2011.
This wonderful classic is Twain's reminiscence about life on the Mississippi when he was a boy and a young man. It had changed for him since those days - the change for us is even more tremendous.