This sounds like a specialty item, but I found it fascinating-so probably many others will feel, as I did, that it opens up a whole new way of life, with a unique sort of regional book. For here is the life of the men- and women- who have chosen the river life -- as crew, pilots, captains, cooks, on the tow boats that make the rivers infinitely important the whole of their length. The book grew out of a research photographic job done for Standard Oil; it is -- to outward seeming- a superb photographic collection, giving the feel of the life, through pictures, the types, the river banks, and so on. But actually it is much more than this, for the text recaptures the hold the river has on its people. Much of the text is actual record of the words of the river people; there are character bits here, stories, inside glimpses of what is required in training, the daily routine, the emergencies, the changes in river traffic as flood control and levees, river engineering, inventions, modern touches have altered the traditional. But much of the old way remains. Without confining this to the run from Pittsburgh to New Orleans, this is focussed on the Ohio and the Mississippi.