Linda Gaines's Reviews > When the Mississippi Ran Backwards: Empire, Intrigue, Murder, and the New Madrid Earthquakes

This is kind of an odd book. The New Madrid earthquake, which is supposedly about, it only a minor part of the book. It gives history of New Madrid, which is interesting. The majority of the book is about white settler and Native American conflicts, two nephews of Thomas Jefferson who moved to Kentucky, and one of the inventors of the paddlewheel steamboat who was the first to sail down the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers in said steamboat. It provides history on those three topics before and after the earthquake and sort of how the earthquake affected those histories, but the connection is not all that strong. The book and the histories were interesting, but more information about the earthquake itself and the affect it had on more general history would have been far more interesting to me.