Mark Valley Books

Loose-leaf bound, so you can remove the pages you want to carry with you. Very clever. Covers the Sawtooth Wilderness and surrounding areas from Challis to Lowman to Ketchum. Includes detailed descriptions and good contour maps. Black-and-white photos.

Mark Neuzil and Merry Foresta have brought back to life with this book a Mississippi River that has long since disappeared below the brackish water of the Big Muddy. Henry Peter Bosse captured on film the Mississippi River that Mark Twain navigated as a river boat captain, the Mormans had to traverse leaving Nauvoo, IL for points west and that Lewis and Clark travelled on the way to the west coast. He did this at a time just before it disappeared below the backwaters of today's lock and dam system. Bosse's photographs, while valued at over $1,000,000 are priceless to those of us that have looked out over the river as it exists today and wondered "What lies below the surface of that water?" or "What did the river look like before the lock and dams were built"
If you have ever lived on or loved "The River" this book is a must buy!

Henry Peter Bosse's exquisite photographs of the Upper Mississippi River, taken between 1883 and 1893, are little known today owing to their great scarcity. Fewer than two hundred of his images have ever reached the open market, and there has yet to be a major museum exhibition of his work. Despite this, Bosse's large cyanotypes currently sell in the twenty thousand dollar range and are much sought after by museums and discerning photo collectors. A first rate book on his career and images has been needed for over a decade.

Sadly, that need has yet to be fulfilled. Mark Neuzil's decidedly poor offering contributes only badly reproduced photographs and a text that, while eminently readable, is overshadowed by glaring inaccuracies.

Early on, Neuzil opines that Bosse "...was tutored in Greek and Latin and completed classical studies at Magdeburg (Germany) where he added courses in engineering and art..." (pg.7). But in the next sentence he notes, "There was no university at Magdeburg at the time...", and cites a sole obituary as a basis for his "facts" regarding Bosse's education. Since Neuzil also notes that there are no known historical documents pertaining to Bosse prior to his arrival in the U.S. this attribution seems something of a stretch.

On the next page he names Montgomery Meigs, U.S. Civil Engineer, as a possible photography tutor to Bosse, citing Meigs' experience with a camera and his own cyanotypes. A little rudimentary research on the author's part would have revealed that all of Meigs' known photos date from AFTER 1893, by which time Bosse had apparently stopped taking pictures.

Two paragraphs on, Neuzil emphatically states that, "In the floating office that was the BARNARD (a Corps riverboat) Bosse possibly enjoyed the company of Mark Twain...(because)...Some of the author's river travel in 1882 came via the BARNARD, ...captained...by a friend of Twain's."

This must come as a huge surprise to Twain scholars. The author's 1882 Mississippi River trip was fully chronicled by the popular press of the day and neither they nor any Twain historian since ever stumbled across this piece of information. Neuzil offers no source for the tidbit, and actually can't do so - for the simple reason that it never happened!

The author also claims that in 1878 Bosse began work for the Rock Island Engineer Office, "...where he was employed as chief draftsman until his death in 1903." However, Mary Forresta's introduction to Neuzil's book states (correctly) that F.S. Eastman was chief draftsman at Rock Island when Bosse arrived. Indeed, Bosse only achieved that position after Eastman left the job some years later.

An author's perceived veracity is of paramount interest to the reader, particularly when that author is writing history or offering himself as an expert on the subject at hand. The errors mentioned here occur IN THE FIRST TEN PAGES and only the need for brevity prohibits pointing to more. Add to the mix a collection of images that, while fascinating, are still bland and tepid versions of Bosse's originals and you have VIEWS ON THE MISSISSIPPI.

That said, buy it anyway. Henry Bosse's photographs deserve far wider circulation than they have achieved, which is a pity. His images offer us an intimate glimpse of Mark Twain's Mississippi River, up close and personal - or at least closer than anyone else of the period. If you enjoy Mark Twain and/or the Mississippi you'll enjoy Bosse's photos - but take the attached history with substantially more than a pinch of salt. Actually, take it with a great honkin' truck load.

Mike Conner

i've been looking for a book that discusses the history of markets around the world, including stock markets, and this one does a decent job of filling part of that desire. what interests me is the way in which we, as humans, have gone from an idea of selling concrete things to abstract things, and how that's evolved over time.

smith's book starts with some of the precursors to the modern stock market, and he'll return to some of those markets (such as the french and german bourses) when the focus shifts to the american and london markets (which have come to dominate the global market perspective). quite a bit of the book seems to race to this time period, basically feeling like a big cheer for the american way. not that this is wrong, i just wanted a broader perspective.

as you might expect, because the book is written by an american in the past few years, it's lean on early history. it covers some interesting parts well, such as the rises and crashes in the early french markets, but it could do better. it also plays a decent bit to the japanese markets (and the huge asian market crash at the end of the 20th century), which is pretty nice, and it does a decent job of introducing options markets. it doesn't cover the russian markets well, or the overall trend of very small markets building up around the world currently. too little time to observe, says smith. and while this is accurate, it's not too early to discuss what forces are behind these changes more in depth.

while i'm still looking for that one great volume, this one is a fair start. 3 to 3.5 stars.

Albert Einstein prized imagination above knowledge. Mark Sunwall is on of those writers who is not only blessed with an abundant imagination but whose knowledge of history enables him to create realistic alternate worlds for his characters to inhabit. Most writers use history only as a background but Mark Sunwall envisions a history that seems familiar but that is uniquely his own. Literature and history embody two distinct aspects of human endeavor that in Mark Sunwall's work are intertwined in some way to create a whole.
The three "Gothic" tales in In The Uncanny Valley are unrelated in setting, story line and characters, but each demonstrates how "remarkably fragile and finite" our human world is.
Lawrence Dorr aka (Janos Shoemyen)
July 24, 2008