Mark Valley Books

THIS BOOK IS A "MUST HAVE" FOR COLLECTORS OF NORTH CAROLINA POTTERY. THE TEXT IS FULL OF "MARKS OR SIGNATURES" OF THE POTTERS AND THEIR HISTORY. THE PICTURES SHOW THE GLAZES IN "TRUE COLOR" FOR EASY IDENTIFICATION.

If you have the slightest interest in North Carolina's unique pottery tradition, this book provides a lavishly illustrated catalog of the collection of the Mint Museums of Charlotte, NC. Each potter's biography, genealogy and work history is included with an example of the work of each. There are essays by pottery experts to explain the background on various types of pottery, techniques, locations, etc., as well as the history of pottery making in North Carolina. This would make a wonderful Christmas gift for any North Carolinian.

This terrific guidebook is a must have if you are looking for trail rides in central Colorado. After years of deciphering rides from the local city paper, and cobbling together ride ideas from various online websites, finally here is a comprehensive guide to the best mountain biking routes in the Arkansas Valley. The book is organized by town with a wide variety of rides in each location. On the last page, it tells you that there is a free website associated with the book where you can download the GPS files for the routes. The combination of print and online formats gives more information than I've ever seen with any other guide for the area. It makes planning my visits to area extremely easy and saves me time and gas when I'm there.

I just finished reading this book, it is changing the way i view my life. Pastor Rutland so=poke at my school last fall, and thats when i bought the book. I am Glad I did. Each chapter is easy to read, and easy to understand. Lots of breaks in it so you can stop and think about what you just read.

Mark Twain travels, experiences, observes, and then accurately narrates. This book clearly reflects that from the beginning to the end. Twain is a riverboat captain, and travels up and down on the Mississippi river, seeing cities such as New Orleans, Memphis, and St. Louis. He describes his experiences in very lively fashion to the extent that the reader can very well imagine what river travel was like in Twain's time. It should not be forgotten that river travel at that time was commercial and an essential way of getting back and forth. And Twain makes the reader feel that riverboat travel was lots of fun and very adventurous even at that time. The book is a valuable contribution to history in that Twain accurately describes what has happened and what the events mean for those who live in that time period. Personally, I feel that this is one of the best books I have ever read. Also, the last time I went on a trip aboard the steamer NATCHEZ in New Orleans, I heard the on-board announcer say that if Mark Twain were alive today, the NATCHEZ would be his home. Quite accurate!

This book really makes you think about what we are doing to our tropical rainforests and why we need to do more to protect them. This book makes you feel like you are actually in the forest with the medicine man when you are reading it.

Flowing through the largest wilderness region in the lower 48 states, Idaho's Salmon River courses through an area almost the size of the state of Ohio. This region popularly called the "Salmon River Country" is pretty much the same as it was 200 years ago when Lewis and Clark explored the river's headwaters. Now photographer Mark Lisk has showcased the wild beauty of the river and some of the hardy people who live and work along this spectacular waterway in Salmon River Country. Enhanced with an informed and informative wilderness essay by Stephen Stuebner, Salmon River Country's more than 100 superbly presented full color photographs make paging through this coffeetable book a true and highly recommended treat for the armchair traveler and an inspiration for anyone to make their own excursion along one of the loveliest wilderness rivers America has to offer.

Very interesting article that describes a fast growing non-alcoholic beverage company called Mojito Empire that is intoducing an ultra-premium Mojito Island mixer.

As a member of Dr. Easley's former church, obviously I will be biased for this book, but it is a wonderful handbook for dealing with the inevitable trials of life. Ernest writes with a clarity and simplicity that will make it easy for every reader to grasp his meaning and find out how to apply these principles to their own life.

Mark Twain (1835-1910) grew up along the banks of the Mississippi River, and he captures the feel of the mighty river during the steamboat era in this superb narrative and memoir. I particularly liked the earlier chapters, as Twain describes his youthful tutelage as an aspiring steamboat pilot in the years before the Civil War. Readers see what it was like guiding a steamboat over a river full of dangerous snags and sandbars - in clear daylight, through thick fog, and on moonless nights. The author then jumps ahead to his middle age - describing life along the river and in the South after the Civil War, and including politics, epidemics, and the supplanting of steamboats by railroads. The book's second half lacks a bit of the magic found earlier, but remains eminently readable and informative. This is a remarkable narrative by a great writer.

I've been reading a lot of classic literature recently, and I also recently saw the Mississippi River for the first time...so this book seemed liked the perfect one for me to read right now.
This is a "non-fictional" book by Mark Twain. (I guess that means based on some truth but embelished in various ways?) In it he recalls the years he spent during his youth as a steamboat pilot on the Mississippi River. Then he suddenly jumps forward many years in the book to when he is an older man. As an older man, he decides to go back and travel on the Mississippi River again. He finds the river much changed. The course of time (the Civil War has come and gone, the expansion of the railroad, and the forces of nature) have greatly changed life on the river. The once thriving steamboat trade has almost disapeared.
Besides his personal recollections, he also includes other interesting stories,history,folklore, talltales, and such. It is written in typical Mark Twain style - his dry sense of humor will bring a smile to your face. I really enjoyed this book.

This book--at times disjointed, rambling, self-referential, and irreverent--is decades ahead of its time. It's an interdisciplinarian's dream as Twain takes on economics, geography, politics, ancient and contemporary history, and folklore with equal ease. Mostly though, one appreciates his knack for exaggeration, the tall tale, and the outright lie. It's a triumph of tone, as he lets you in on his wild wit, his keen observation, and his penchant for bending the truth without losing his credibility as a guide.

The book's structure is also modern: He recounts his days as a paddlewheel steam boat "cub," piloting the hundreds of miles of the Mississippi before the Civil War, then, in Part 2, returns to retrace his paddleboat route. Although a few of his many digressions don't work (they sometimes sound formulaic or too detailed) most of the narrative is extremely entertaining. Twain seems caught between admiration and disdain for the "modern" age-but he also rejects over-sentimentality over the past. He writes with beauty and cynicism, verve and humor. Very highly recommended!

Twain's account of his years on the Mississippi is part travel book, part memoir, and part historical work, with a few sketches, stories, and tall tales tossed in for good measure. There is even an outtake from the not-yet-published "Huckleberry Finn," along with extensive excerpts from historical and contemporary accounts by other authors. This smorgasbord of material makes for an uneven book, but much of it shows Mark Twain at his humorous and humanistic best.

The kernel of the volume (and its best, most cohesive section) is in chapters 4 through 17; this material appeared in the Atlantic magazine in 1875 and recalls his early life as a crew member on steamboats in the early 1850s. His adventures as a young man are fraught with danger, full of comedy, populated by a number of ornery, mischievous, and reckless characters, and occasionally embellished (although Twain is a bit obvious when he's fobbing off a yarn). As Twain later wrote in "Puddn'head Wilson, "if there was anything better in this world than steamboating, it was the glory to be got by telling about it."

After he published the series in the Atlantic, Twain added another 46 chapters; much of it an account of his homecoming (incognito--or so he'd hoped) to the Mississippi River in 1882, when the steamboat had been rendered obsolete by the railroad. Many of these descriptions are unusually (for Twain) melancholy; he remarks upon the relatively emptiness of the river traffic and notes the transformations to the river and its banks that had made steamboat travel safer but less adventurous. His new journey provides opportunities to relate a number of stories--some allegedly told to him on the river and a few unpublished tales that he deemed relevant and worthy of inclusion.

The material from other sources, unfortunately, tends to bog things down--and there are about 10,000 words of it commingled in the text and included as appendices. Twain gathered newspaper articles and historical documents; he also included travel writing from earlier visitors, primarily Europeans distracted by how Americans and their homes were horribly uncouth and dirty. (You almost get the feeling that Twain would have smacked "the once renowned and vigorously hated" Frances Trollope upside the head if he'd had the chance; she provides Twain with the most interesting, if snooty, descriptions of traveling along the Mississippi early in the century.)

The material Twain wrote, however, more than compensates for the dryness of the extraneous stuff. As always, he is quotable, witty, amusing, and provocative. In spite of its excesses, nobody has done the Mississippi better.

In Life on the Mississippi, Twain recounts his river experiences from boyhood to riverboat captain and beyond. Encompassing the years surrounding the Civil War, this book is an excellent source of 19th-century Americana as well as an anthology of the mighty river itself. Replete with rascally rivermen, riparian hazards, deluge, catastrophe, and charm, Life on the Mississippi is another of Twain's stellar literary achievements.

Wit and wisdom are expected from Twain and this book does not disappoint. It is equally valuable for it's period descriptions of the larger river cities (New Orleans, St. Louis, St. Paul), as well as the small town people and places ranging the length of America's imposing central watershed.

The advent of railroads signalled the end of the Mississipi's grand age of riverboat traffic, but, never fear, Life on the Mississippi brings it back for the reader as only Samuel Clemens can. Highly recommended.

As a transplant to California, I picked this book up out of historical curiosity and, from that perspective, it does not disappoint. The story of the Boswell Company's growth and not-infrequent run-ins with regulators and legislators is an interesting, eminently readable history of California itself.

Water rights and agriculture policy are, rather dry subjects in and of themselves, but told as part of the story of this interesting family and company, they come to life.

The only drawback of the book is that the authors can barely conceal their utter contempt for their subject. In numerous places, they abandon all journalistic detachment and express their opinion as fact, usually in a blistering condemnation of their target.

Consider this screed against former Los Angeles Times Publisher Harrison Gray Otis on page 83: "Otis was a fourth-rate publisher and first-rate bully who used the columns of his disgraceful newspaper to spill bile and venom at organized labor and an infinite list of enemies, real and imagined."-- Fact or Opinion?

The authors' inherent bias notwithstanding, they did a good job of research and crafted an engaging narrative.

I'm not feeling real verbose so just let me say that this book illustrates so much more about US history than the mere subject of cotton suggests. The Boswell story is the American story of our moving further and further away from democratic, egalitarian principles in the pursuit of various notions of efficiency.

Great book. A great non-fiction companion piece would be "Wealth and Democracy" by Kevin Philips.

This particular chapter details the rise of a farming empire in California's Central Valley. Coming from Greene County Georgia, the Boswell family built this empire largely on the backs of migrant labor and water--lots and lots of water. One other point: on the way to becoming one of the largest landowners in California, the Boswell's forever reshaped the landscape and drained Tulare Lake.

Prior to settlement, the Central Valley's river floodplain system nourished some 1.4 million acres of tule marshes and wooded wetlands. The draining of vast sweeps of wetlands along with the damming and channeling of four major rivers has altered the landscape in both a manner and at a scale that is, quite literally, unprecedented. If you wanted to focus on a single family/farming empire that played the biggest role in this alternation, then you could do no better than The King of California.

Tulare Lake lies near the southern end of California's Central Valley. The proximity of such a huge, seasonal lake to a large farming operation was a mixed blessing. During dry years, as the shoreline contracted, the land could be transformed to grow grain or row crops. In wet years, however, as the Sierra Nevada snow pack melted, the runoff of the Kings, Kaweah, Tule, and Kern Rivers filled this basin. The big runoff produced high flows into July and August, resulting in a vast and expanding lake shore. The flooded farmland resulted in less crops, less money... J.G. Boswell was determined to rein these waters in and convinced the Federal Government to help.

In an errant attempt to encourage small family farms, loopholes in the reclamation laws brought most of the land in the Central Valley under the control of a handful of private landowners. The Californian land barons went by the names of Henry Miller, J. G. Boswell, and "Cockeye" Salyer. The land around Tulare Lake eventually got folded into Boswell farming empire. In the final analysis, the Boswell's got the land, the water rights, and handed the tax-payers the bill for the construction of Pine Flat Dam on the Kings River.

I feel a bit of guilt when I throw on a mass produced cotton T-shirt (e.g., I can buy a three-pack for under ten dollars). Because this cheap cotton underwear really isn't that cheap. Mass produced cotton uses a lot of water. In fact, to grow a single T-shirt takes 257 gallons of water. If you own a piece of cotton underwear, chances are pretty good it's fibers came from land in California's Central Valley. And by default, you can be sure the Boswell family grew it. The King of California tells the interesting story of how the Boswells became the single largest grower of cotton in the United States.

This book is way too long and somewhat redundant and boring. The basic story is good, but the author takes too much time and too many pages to tell it.

I would recommend this book to anyone interested in politics, agriculture, or water rights. It is a well-written and very readable.

It follows four generations of the Boswell family to trace how they assembled the largest industrial farm in the world. Along the way, the authors explore the history of the San Joaquin valley and those who came there to farm it, those who left and those who got left behind. For every group that made a fortune, there were many others who were disappointed. There are plenty of interesting stories of Washington and Sacramento politics, and stories of common people following dreams.

The book examines the effect of large scale farming on farm owners, on those who work the farms now and those who worked them in the past. It provides some good background on the politics of water rights and government involvement in farming, and on the involvement of agriculture in local, state and federal politics.

If you are interested in the politics and history of water in the western states, Cadillac Desert by Marc Reisner is one of the best books I have read on any subject.