BIG MUDDY

Superficial, pseudo-folksy report on a trip down the ``Father of Waters'' undertaken by Hall (English/Arkansas Tech Univ.) and Wood (an economist/consultant) in 1991. Having failed in a boyhood attempt to navigate the Mississippi by raft, the authors made their adulthood journey down Route 61 in a tuned-up Lincoln touring car, stopping along the way at Native American mounds, flood-control stations, ``good-ole boy'' roadside diners, Fundamentalist churches, high-security prisons. Though inspired by Twain's Life on the Mississippi, which detailed that author's nostalgic 1882 return to the scenes of his youth, the present journey seems more an exploration of the hundreds of less interesting spots along the route from the headwaters of the Mississippi at Minnesota's Lake Itasca to its debouchment on Louisiana's Gulf Coast. Most of the authors' stops prompt brief, thin recitals of each area's historical background, with few fresh takes. Hall and Wood focus on the problems of pollution and race relations in a predictable manner, and even their anecdotes concerning inhabitants encountered along the way—young transients, old barflies, weathered river-men—lack originality. And though the text is larded with quotations from Twain, the authors too often fail to convey a link between Twain's words and their own. Hall and Wood's humorless and mundane responses to their odyssey leave their recital as flat as the Mississippi Delta: Stick with Twain. (B&w photographs throughout.)