I enjoyed this book quite a bit. It is the story of a towboat and its crew on a journey up the Mississippi during a flood, where everything that can go wrong, does go wrong. I thought that Bissell did a good job of taking characters who are fairly stock: the Kid, the crusty Captain, the Duke - and making them into real characters rather than caricatures. Bissell sprinkles quotes from Mark Twain, Joseph Conrad and others into the beginning of each chapter, a nice touch. ( )

2361 High Water, by Richard Bissell (read 23 Feb 1991) This is a 1954 novel by Bissell, who was born in Dubuque and died there in 1977. He was a riverboat pilot and also worked in his family's clothing factory in Dubuque. This is kind of a simplistic story about a trip up the Mississippi in a flood. I was struck by some of his Midwestenisms--his narrator put a letter in his jacket "so it wouldn't get rained on" and then "renched" something out. It has been many a year since I said "renched" for "rinsed." His prose reminded me of some of my brother John's writings. ( )