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Humorist Roy Blount Jr. leaves the familiar tensions of uptown Manhattan to seek downstream America in The Main Stream, an engrossing, delightful, and mysterious vision of 21st-century life on the Mississippi. Blount soon finds that not much has changed since Mark Twain's day as a riverboat captain and author of the Mississippi epic Huckleberry Finn. Wading into a northern Minnesota brook, Blount begins a long, southbound journey, along the way visiting an Ojibway Indian wild rice farm, stone-skipping with Garrison Keillor, catfishing barehanded in Illinois, looking in at a school for Delta blues, and checking out a Greenpeace crusade against petrochemical factories in Louisiana. Blount learns, just as Huck and Jim did, that the river hosts pockets of American obsession with guns, misanthropy, hopelessness, and entrenched racism. But he also encounters heroes, seers, and poet-knights battling the Army Corps of Engineers and every vain, endless effort to kill the soul of an indomitable river. --Tom Keogh
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