The Mark Twain Forum needs a reviewer for the following book:

     Powers, Ron.  _Dangerous Water: A Biography of the Boy Who Became
     Mark Twain_.  New York: Basic Books, 1999.  Pp. 328.  Bibliography,
     notes, index.  Cloth, 5-3/4" x 8-1/2".  $24.00.
     ISBN 0-465-07670-X.

The description from Amazon.com reads:

     From Pulitzer Prize-winning author and journalist Ron Powers comes
     a refreshingly imaginative recreation of Samuel Clemens' boyhood
     years in Hannibal and how he drew on these years for the rest of
     his life as he wrote under the now-iconic name of Mark Twain.  Mark
     Twain remains one of our most quintessentially American writers,
     yet few authors have examined, let alone understood, the
     well-spring from which Twain's novels stem.  _Dangerous Water_ is
     the first significant book on the early life of Mark Twain.

     As Powers writes in _Dangerous Water_, Twain's early years were a
     decidedly uninnocent time, marked by numerous deaths and his
     father's bankruptcy.  Twain dealt with those personal tragedies in
     a typically American manner: through humor and the tall tale.  From
     the time that a ten-year-old Samuel Clemens lit out for the
     territory and boarded his first Mississippi steamer to his first
     encounter with a traveling "mesmerizer" (from whom he gained a
     penchant for acting and for spectacle); from the brooding sense of
     guilt and fear of eternal damnation inculcated into him at church
     to the superstitions and stories of witchcraft he learned from the
     blacks on his farm, Mark Twain was shaped by the distinctly
     American landscape, culture, and people of Hannibal, Missouri.

     As he has so ably demonstrated in his previous books, _White Town
     Drowsing_ and _Far From Home_, Ron Powers is one of our premier
     chroniclers of small town American life.  A native of Hannibal
     himself, he is uniquely qualified to write of that now-vanished
     world's effect on the boy who would become Mark Twain; a world
     whose "dangerous waters" of experience Mark Twain learned to
     navigate, turning trials into those humorous stories that have so
     powerfully influenced American literature.

     ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Ron Powers is a journalist, novelist, and
     nonfiction writer. The author of eight books, he has been a
     columnist for The Chicago Sun Times and GQ magazine, and has been
     widely published in magazines such as The New York Times Book
     Review and Conde Nast Traveler.

As usual, the review must be of publishable quality, and it would be
due within two months of your receipt of the book (i.e., due
late-August 1999).  The deadline is particularly important, as we are
making every effort for Forum reviews to appear before print reviews.
If you are inclined to procrastinate, please don't offer to review the
book.

If you would like to see the general content and style of Forum book
reviews, feel free to browse the archive of reviews, which are
available at TwainWeb:

     http://web.mit.edu/linguistics/www/forum/

If you're interested in writing a review, please send me both your
home and institutional mailing addresses and phone numbers.  If I
don't know you already, it would be helpful for you to explain in what
respect you're qualified to write the review.  (If we haven't
exchanged e-mail recently, it might be a good idea for you to remind
me of this info.)

I look forward to hearing from you.

Taylor Roberts
Book review editor, Mark Twain Forum