From the Bottom Up: One Man's Crusade to Clean America's Rivers

Book Description

Chad Pregracke was a high school student when he first glimpsed the trash that littered the bottom of the Mississippi, a shocking sight that launched him on a quest to clean up the river. After four discouraging years seeking government help without success, he decided to take his fund-raising private—and a corporate sponsor decided to take a chance on this naive but unshakably determined young man.

Ten years later Chad's one-man project has grown into a $500,000 operation with more than 60 sponsors (including National Geographic). His work has been featured on national news and won numerous honors and accolades, but its grassroots, can-do spirit still thrives aboard the 135-foot barge that serves as home base for his organization, a floating environmental classroom, and an inspiration to people of all ages.

This is the story of his personal triumph as an advocate for America's rivers. Chad measures success in tons of garbage removed and thousands of people with a new stake in—and a new understanding of—the river environment. But From the Bottom Up is much more as well: a first-person chronicle of Chad's own life along the Mississippi featuring colorful characters, a near-death experience, a haunted swamp, and other flourishes worthy of a modern Mark Twain; and a fascinating portrait of the river itself which explores everything from the natural history of mussels and catfish to Indian lore to the key role of the Mississippi in our country's history.

Customer Reviews:

We need more people like this! .......2007-08-23

It's a great book that details how one person saw a need for change no matter what it took. Chad perservered (and continues to) and has created this movement that draws in sponsors, staff and volunteers who are happy and willing to help with enthusiasim. It's very well written and makes for a good read. Thanks Chad and Jeff - keep up the good work!

Fantastic! .......2007-06-15

I could not be more engaged in the book than I am - it is so thrilling and to read about the experiences they have had it makes you wish that you could have been there! It is just excellent! I love it - and I'm so excited when I carry the book somewhere and people ask me what I'm reading because I can't wait to tell people some of the CRAZY things that have happened to Chad and his crew.

ANYONE could read this book and thoroughly enjoy it - I even share parts of the book with my 6 year old son who can't wait to get back out the XStream Clean up this year!

It's amazing how he can take something seemingly so mundane as picking up garbage - write a book about it - and it is just an amazing adventure!

Rising to the Top.......2007-05-29

"From the Bottom Up" is an enormously impressive account of the prodigious effort and success of Chad Pregracke and his clean-up team to take on a difficult and necessary problem in our environment.
Our world needs this motivation, talent, work, and hands-on planning to protect our planet. Jeff Barrow's excellent writing makes the information flow easily and captivates the reader's interest. The dedicated and hard-working team forces attention to rise to the top of our consciousness and educates the reader on the necessity of cleaning up our waterways, taking responsibility for our environment, and stimulates our will to do it.

Great, very entertaining story about one man's idea and his ability to get thousands to help........2007-05-01

It's hard to write an accurate description of this book, let alone Chad Pregracke's accomplishments. Do you measure it in the number (545) of refrigerators he's pulled from rivers? Do you measure it in the number (15,991) of tires his group has pulled up? Or possibly by the number (1) of horse's heads he's pulled from the river? Combine these stats with tons of press coverage alongside a trip to the White House to receive an award alongside Rudy Giuliani and Bill and Melinda Gates and you've got a very good story.

Over the past 10 years Chad has assembled a group of volunteers, sponsors, and genuinely interesting people to help him accomplish a daunting goal of cleaning up America's rivers. This has extended into an audacious goal of planting a million trees and educating thousands of students on his "floating classroom."

This book will give you an inspiring, very entertaining snapshot of how it was done and even gives you a quick blueprint of how to do something in your own area. Read it for an inspiring portrait of a true original who started with a small idea and turned it into a national movement.

It's a real CRUSADE - action - danger - adventure & comic relief!.......2007-04-27

This is an amazing story with never a dull moment. Chad has to be one of the most tenacious persons on the face of the earth! The obstacles he overcame were numerous and the spirit he faced them with was awe inspiring. They don't call it the Mighty Mississippi for no reason. Chad's fabulous sensce of humor comes shining through from this self appointed trash talking, picking, sorting, recycling dude.

Average customer rating:

Ordinary but also Extraordinary
Breathtaking Lyricism & Abstract Imagery
Love, sadness, and growing up in the Caribbean
A Genius Mind
Lovely

At the Bottom of the River
Jamaica Kincaid
Manufacturer: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

Contemporary | General | Literature & Fiction | Subjects | Books

Literary | General | Literature & Fiction | Subjects | Books

General | Short Stories | Literature & Fiction | Subjects | Books

ASIN: 0374527342

Book Description

Jamaica Kincaid's inspired, lyrical short stories

Reading Jamaica Kincaid is to plunge, gently, into another way of seeing both the physical world and its elusive inhabitants. Her voice is, by turns, naively whimsical and biblical in its assurance, and it speaks of what is partially remembered partly divined. The memories often concern a childhood in the Caribbean--family, manners, and landscape--as distilled and transformed by Kincaid's special style and vision.

Kincaid leads her readers to consider, as if for the first time, the powerful ties between mother and child; the beauty and destructiveness of nature; the gulf between the masculine and the feminine; the significance of familiar things--a house, a cup, a pen. Transfiguring our human form and our surroundings--shedding skin, darkening an afternoon, painting a perfect place--these stories tell us something we didn't know, in a way we hadn't expected.

Customer Reviews:

Ordinary but also Extraordinary.......2007-01-17

I got this book because it is one of the required books I need for my college class. When I began reading the book, I didn't like nor dislike the book because it is a strange book comparing to many books I have read so far in college and through out my life. This book consists of many ordinary stories such as our everyday life. For instance, "I am trying to read. The book is lying in my lap. I look around me, trying to find something on which to focus my eyes." Some of the stories are extraordinary or strange if you would want to consider them. For instance, "Now I am a girl, but one day I will marry a woman-a red-skin woman with black bramblebush hair and brown eyes, who wears skirts that are so big I can easily bury my head in them." or "I stood up on the edge of the basin and felt myself move. But what self? For I had no feet, or hands, or head, or heart-having once been there, were now stripped away, as if I had been dipped again and again, over and over, in a large vat filled with some precious elements and were now reduced to something I yet had no name for. I had no name for the thing I had become, so new was it to me, except that I did not exist in pain or pleasure, east or west or north or south, or up or down, or past or present or future, or real or not real." This book is a beautiful poem but from reading the book, it didn't teach me much but it does somewhat inspire me to write my own book. (If this what you call a book, I can write one also.)

Breathtaking Lyricism & Abstract Imagery.......2004-09-02

'At the Bottom of the River' is a lyrical collection of some of Jamaica Kincaid's most provocative writing. Although occasionally confounding in her use of abstract images and construction of abstruse and ethereal narratives, Kincaid's stories nevertheless contain breathtaking lyricism and innovative lines of poetic prose; her words seem to reverberate from the very recesses of metamorphic meaning.

This collection begins innocently enough with one of Kincaid's most impacting writings, Girl. Girl is one of the most severe but accurate depictions of the volatile intensity between mother and daughter. Fueled by a combination of love, fear, and partial loathing, a mother doles out a mantra of life lessons with equal parts concern and venom: "When buying cotton to make yourself a nice blouse, be sure that it doesn't have gum on it, because that way it won't hold up well after a wash. ... Always eat your food in such a way that it won't turn someone else's stomach; on Sundays try to walk like a lady and not like the (...) you are so bent on becoming." The essays that follow are sinewy with sexual, violent, and spiritual themes.

Kincaid's strength lies in her rage. One senses it above all in her amazing control over words, which, while extremely satisfying on the level of literary technique, also comes across as a refusal to be vulnerable and a reply to anyone who would try to keep her down.

Like a journal, 'At the Bottom of the River' matures in content as it proceeds. Kincaid's prose-poetry initially appears whimsical (she describes some pebbles as "not pebbly enough") and that's the mystique of her writing, how it almost capriciously masks cerebral contemplations on living, dying, and the struggle in-between.

Love, sadness, and growing up in the Caribbean.......2004-05-02

Jamaica Kincaid's AT THE BOTTOM OF THE RIVER is a study of voice and language that first brought the author recognition beyond the pages of literary journals. These ten stories, all but the last extremely short, are set in an intense Caribbean landscape where a girl comes of age in the shadow of her mother; they are hallucinatory, tense, and indirect, leaving much for the reader to interpret. For example, the first story, "Girl", is a monologue spoken by the mother giving advice ("this is how you set a table for dinner") interspersed with comments degrading the daughter. The two italicized, one-sentence responses from the daughter speak volumes about this complicated relationship. "What I Have Been Doing Lately" is a dream-like narrative that lists what the narrator is (probably not) doing and, in the process, illustrates the emotional state of someone so sad that she just wants to lie in bed. "At the Bottom of the River", the final, longest, and most traditional of the stories, implies the past and future of the narrator through visions seen "at the bottom of the river."

Kincaid's style combines the effect of the simple but perfect word with the lilt of Caribbean rhythms. On the surface, these stories are not difficult to read, but they can be challenging to understand for the reader accustomed to more traditional methods of storytelling. The collection is about as short as a book can get, and so the stories can be read in one sitting, back to back, although their absorption can take much longer.

A Genius Mind.......2004-04-06

At the Bottom of the River is a lovely rendition of a writer's mind, leisure, vision, appeal, hope, awareness and understanding. This project surpasses what the common reader readies for in the telling of a good story. Each sentence in this work is a story. I will write it again: Each sentence is a story with perfect images, "The branches were dead; a fly hung dead on the branches, its fragile body fluttering in the wind as if it were remnants of a beautiful gown." Ms. Kincaid's style throughout At the Bottom might put one in the mind of Gertrude Stein. The repetition. Certainly, however, Ms. Kincaid's project is her own, very distinctive genius. It takes us to a place that lacks anything hackneyed and it is shaped with qualities that peck at our curiousity. The book works in first person and third person never conveniently laying the story out as a consecutive. But there are characters; there is a central character to follow. The movement is chopped with these extraordinary, brilliant images beyond description and most every sentence leaves on the tongue the question of "who did that?" or "why?": "Someone is making a basket, someone is making a girl a dress or a boy a shirt, someone is making her husband a soup with cassava so that he can take it to the cane field tomorrow, someone is making his wife a beautiful mahogany chest, someone is sprinkling a colorless powder outside a closed door so that someone else's child will be stillborn." And so you get these incredible juxtapositions along side wholesome chops of fascinating imagery. We move through childhood, through relationships, through friendships, through parents and through self. And there is even dialogue for the reader who whines that there is no plot.

Ms. Kincaid writes this piece in a style that is deeply dense and in a way we are able to see, on the pages, a character's mind, discovery, understanding and wonder (no part of nature is left unturned). We are even privy to questions and philosophy and resignations about life and death. In this piece Ms. Kincaid gives new meaning to "the universal eye".

At the Bottom of the River is brilliant, genius! A must read!

Lovely.......2003-12-20

Kincaid's stories have a distinct voice and accent, which perpetuate the subversion of standard rules prescribed by centres of authority. She appropriates that authority, by indulging in a style of writing which is unique (the two page sentences) and the inversion of punctuation and syntax canons. Her plotless stories describe a state of being which is fractured, which has no beginning or an end, which is struggling to come to terms with its marginalized existence in terms of race, color, gender and economic status. Being an immigrant in USA, the nameless character's struggle for self-definition, identity, and a truncated and oppressed past transfigure powerfully in this collection. The sense of dislocation encountered in her journey to America, the traveling from the Carribean to a new country, a new culture and discourse in which she must chart her own path towards self-discovery, enlightenment out her 'blackness', the assertion of her 'girl'hood, can only be relocated in vague forms 'at the bottom of the river'.

Customer Reviews:

Great start to a mystery series........1999-02-11

Great escapist fare. Brewer knows his reconstruction era history and it shows in this novel. I enjoyed the human failings of the main characters. It made them believable.

Great start to a mystery series........1999-02-11

Great escapist fare. Brewer knows his reconstruction era history and it shows in this novel. I enjoyed the human failings of the main characters. It made them believable.

The unlikely trio of an ex-Confederate cavalryman, an ex-Union gunboat captain and a prostitute work together to solve the mystery of the sinking of riverboats along the Mississippi River.You'll sympathize with the characters and cheer when they get their man.

Average customer rating:
At the Bottom of the River
Jamaica Kincaid
Manufacturer: Aventura--Random House
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback
ASIN: B000ODDIOS

Average customer rating:
The Word on the Brazos;: Negro preacher tales from the Brazos bottoms of Texas
John Mason Brewer
Manufacturer: University of Texas Press
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Unknown Binding

Folklore & Mythology | Social Sciences | Nonfiction | Subjects | Books
African-American Studies | Special Groups | Social Sciences | Nonfiction | Subjects | Books
Folklore | Mythology | World Literature | Literature & Fiction | Subjects | Books
General | Mythology | World Literature | Literature & Fiction | Subjects | Books
ASIN: B0007DPV8Q

Average customer rating:
Swamps, river bottoms, and canebrakes
Brooke Meanley
Manufacturer: Barre Publishers
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Unknown Binding

General | Biology | Biological Sciences | Science | Subjects | Books
Natural History | Nature & Ecology | Science | Subjects | Books
ASIN: 0827172087

Average customer rating:
AMERICAN BOTTOM ARCH: A Summary of the FAI-270 Project Contribution to the Culture History of the Mississippi River Valley (American Bottom Archaeology)

Manufacturer: University of Illinois Press
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

General | Sociology | Social Sciences | Nonfiction | Subjects | Books
General | Archaeology | Social Sciences | Nonfiction | Subjects | Books
Excavation Reports | Archaeology | Social Sciences | Nonfiction | Subjects | Books
ASIN: 0252063465

Average customer rating:

A Powerful Story

Annie John: An oppressed relationship with Mother and Countr

Annie John/at the Bottom of the River/Lucy
Jamaica Kincaid
Manufacturer: Amer Audio Prose Library Inc
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Audio Cassette

General | Books on Cassette | Audiobooks | Formats | Books
ASIN: 1556443625

Customer Reviews:

A Powerful Story.......2002-04-30

How many of us as people in general can relate to being an adorable, obedient, loveable child; then turning into a deceitful, sneaky, and mischievious teenager? Jamacia Kincaid does a beautiful job of depicting this in her novel "Annie John" through her unique writing style. Never, have I read another author's book and felt the same as I did after reading "Annie John". The character Annie John starts off in the story as an adorable child who has a wonderful relaioship with her mother. This particular relationship is almost described as a fairy tale between the two. As time goes on, Annie's mother seemed to intentionally put up a wall between Annie and herself,(perhaps so she wouldn't have to deal with the pain of letting her go). Like many of her novels, British oppression over Antigua was an unannounced element to the novel. For example, she makes reference to how many of her teachers at her school happen to be of British nationality as many of the characters are. After reading this powerful story, one can certainly conclude that this book uniquely describes the dynamics of a mother-daughter relationship and British oppression by letting the reader literally feel the happiness and sorrow at the same time.

Annie John: An oppressed relationship with Mother and Countr.......2002-04-30

Aquatic Disposal Field Investigations, Columbia River Disposal Site, Oregon: Appendix A: Investigation of the Hydraulic Regime and Physical Nature of Bottom Sedimentation

Average customer rating:

Aquatic Disposal Field Investigations, Columbia River Disposal Site, Oregon: Appendix A: Investigation of the Hydraulic Regime and Physical Nature of Bottom Sedimentation
Richard W. Sternberg and others
Manufacturer: U.S. Army Corps of Engineers
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback
ASIN: B000T7N0G0

Product Description

December 1977. Dredged Material Research Program Technical Report D-78-30. U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. 327 pages plus.

An Archaeological Survey of the American Bottoms and Wood River Terrace

Average customer rating:

An Archaeological Survey of the American Bottoms and Wood River Terrace
Patrick J. Munson , and Alan D. Ham
Manufacturer: Illinois State Museum
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback
ASIN: B000JWBBBG

Book Description

Now fans can "Live the romance. Read Loretta Chase" (Christina Dodd) with two delightful stories together for the first time.

Customer Reviews:

One of my first romance novels and I still love it.......2005-09-16

I first picked up Viscount Vagabond in my local library while I was in high school. I fell in love with Loretta Chase's voice and style. Her characters are witty and complex. They are no just the typical hero and heroine. She writes with humor and a sense of fun.

I picked up this as soon as it came out. I'm glad that her back issue books are coming out.

If you like romance, you should definitely pick up Loretta Chase's novels. These earlier books are really sweet.

In Viscount Vagabond, Lord Rand is a reluctant hero to Catherine Pelliston. Through a series of unfortunate events, Catherine ends up in a house if ill repute. He saves her and takes her under his wing. Of course he is determined to send her on her way. He is in no way falling in love with her. At all. Of course, Catherine doesn't want to marry him either.

Viscount Vagabond is a delight I love how the characters dance around each other.

The Devil's Delilah continues with one of the characters from Viscount Vagabond who finds love himself.

Both stories are VERY enjoyable. If you are in the mood for great Regency writing, please pick this book.

Average customer rating:

Viscount Vagabond and Devil's Delilah

ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Mass Market Paperback
ASIN: B000GRQ73Q

Average customer rating:
Bolo Rising
William H. Keith Jr. , and Keith Laumer
Manufacturer: Baen
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Mass Market Paperback

True Crime | True Accounts | Nonfiction | Subjects | Books
Adventure | Science Fiction | Science Fiction & Fantasy | Subjects | Books
General | Science Fiction | Science Fiction & Fantasy | Subjects | Books
High Tech | Science Fiction | Science Fiction & Fantasy | Subjects | Books
Similar Items:

Bolo Brigade

Bolo Strike

The Compleat Bolo

Old Guard: A Bolos Anthology: Book 5

Bolos II: The Unconquerable (Bolos, Book 2)

ASIN: 0671577794

Average customer rating:
Bolo Rising
Keith; Keith, William H. Jr. Laumer
Manufacturer: Baen Books
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Mass Market Paperback
ASIN: B000NZW5FU

Book Description

With a voice at once prophetic, poetic, and scholarly, Johnson shows how the traditional understanding of God as male can make room for the feminine God, and how the experience of women everywhere enriches our view of God and our spiritual lives.

Customer Reviews:

Theology of Sophia.......2005-09-13

Johnson sets out in this book to articulate metaphors for God that are feminine in nature. This serves to counter-balance prodominantly masculine metaphors received from classical tradition. The term Sophia is particularly important.

Johnson explores this topic in four sections. First, she discusses the importance of speech about God and the impact of a feminist perspective. Second, she outlines three resources from which to draw feminine metaphors: women's experience, Scripture, and classical theology. Third, she articulates her understanding of the persons of the Trinity, beginning with the Spirit. Finally, she turns attention to the unity of God and God's suffering.

This book should be required reading for all men interested in theology. We must be aware of the importance of our speech about God. I have only two concerns. First, although Johnson does not seek to eliminate masculine metaphors for God, she avoids them totally in her book. This creates a tension between two equally exclusive forms of speech. Second, the experience of women is important in the book. This is only a problem if we allow experience to alter the way we understand God rather than allowing our understanding of God to illumine our experience. Johnson comes closer to the former.

This is a thought provoking book. It should be read by all interested in speaking of God faithfully.

A must read for any inclusive theology.......2004-12-31

Over the course of Christian history, women have been disenfranchised and oppressed. Patriarchal systems and androcentric mentalities have marginalized women sociologically and psychologically, even within the Christian community. Elizabeth Johnson believes this oppression stems from the language used for God. Because God is referred to exclusively and literally as a male, women have reduced roles within Christianity. Johnson seeks to use new imagery and metaphors for speech about God, in order to emancipate women from this oppression. Johnson recognizes that all language about God is inadequate, but using feminine imagery for God restores human dignity in women and men and helps with the flourishing of humanity.

Structurally, Johnson achieves this goal in four parts. In Part I, Johnson provides context and background for new speech about God. Because speech about God influences identity and praxis, new language for God must be sought. A solution to this problem can be explored using feminist theology, and Johnson provides basic feminist principles for theology. Lastly, Johnson discusses traditional approaches to speaking inclusively about God, and establishes that it is her intent to use only feminine imagery for God. Moving from the background to the foreground, Johnson builds her methodology, in Part II, by using three resources: experience, scripture, and classical theology. The experience of women is central to her theology, and while scripture is integral, Johnson seeks the reclamation of feminine imagery. Johnson also salvages certain principles in classical theology to use in her theology: the divine incomprehensibility, the need for analogy in God-speak, and the need for many names for God. In Part III, Johnson applies reclaimed feminine imagery to each Person in the Trinity. Beginning with the Spirit, and then moving to Jesus and God, Johnson explores what feminine imagery points to in God. Finally, in Part IV, Johnson uses feminine symbols, culminating in SHE WHO IS, to explain the immanent Trinity, the economic Trinity, and God's relation to the suffering world.

Interesting for both, men and women, lay-people and clerics........2004-03-27

An excellent book that one should take enough time to read slowly and thoroughly.
Elizabeth Johnson starts by looking for an appropriate word in order to refer to the Divine. It is common practice to say that God is Spirit. An interesting thing about this is that the word "Spirit" has gradually shifted from being feminine in Hebrew, to neutral in greek and ultimately masculine in latin. This is not much of a surprise in a male-dominated world. In itself this does not necessarily indicate an improvement in the adequacy of our concept of God. But if we consider this particular history of the word, it may suggest that in order to improve our image of God, we need at least to integrate all three aspects: the feminine, the neutral and the masculine.
This will help us take into consideration the fact that God transcends all categories. It will help us deepen our perception of God as mystery.
The important for all those who try to link with the Absolute is to know that God is, more than to know exactly what she, it, or he, is.
Another interesting fact that the author points out in the same perspective, is that the Spirit as such, has never been given a proper name.
Spirit is considered more often than not as an impersonal power, like a blowing wind or a breath in motion.
The title of the book is a clear indication that the author approaches the mystery of God from a feminine point of view.
This is done in a constructive way, without being too aggressive. Even when she suggests that Christ's ability to be savior does not reside in his maleness, but in his huge and steadfast capability to love.
More challenging are her comments on the suggestion made by a number of authors, that the Spirit was, at least for some time, hypostatically united to Mary.
To my view, this offers a good way of understanding the Christian creed when it claims that Christ was conceived from the Spirit and born from Mary.
Altogether, this book is a good incentive for women, but also a real challenge for men.
As a follow-up I would recommend the reading of her more recent book "Truly our sister". Quite logically, after dealing in the present book, with the feminine in God she focuses in the new one, on Mary as a major symbol of the feminine in humankind who also enjoyed a unique relationship to the feminine in God.

The world needs She Who Is.......2002-05-19

Johnson writes with an ultimate goal in mind, that of a transformation into new community. Her vision is one in which harmony with each other and with the earth are realized; an eschatological dream of a new heaven and a new earth where justice dwells and partnership reigns.
As a first step toward this vision her book offers theologicaly founded evidence for expanding our image of God. Language functions; selling a god of violence,or superiority based on maleness or color is not helping us to realize a vision of the kindom of God put forth by Jesus-one where all are included at God's loving banquet. Without this first step toward expanding God's image we humans will always be in violent dissonance with each other and with the earth.
I have read this book no less than six times, it has infomed my vision of the world and my personal goals in life. The language she uses is poetical and moves to the core of our being linking us with the holy.

Some interesting insights....but based on faulty assumptions.......2001-12-02

I found the book to be an endless and somewhat unnecessary attack on classical theism. Her notions of pauline theology, based on a platonic dualism, have been shown to be baseless. The disparities and divisions of the church and society are not proven in her work to stem from classical theism, but are assumed. The church which she diminishes has worked to bridge culturally created divisions, which she fails to admit to. Her pandering into pantheism and panentheism are also disappointing, for she reveals her true intention of not reforming the church, but espousing a new religion.

Books:

Books Index

Books Home

Recommended Books