Yankin’ and Liftin’ Their Whole Lives: A Mississippi River Commercial Fisherman (Shawnee Books)

Amazon.com Price: $25.00 (as of 20/04/2019 00:49 PST- Details)

SKU: 1001-WS1801-A01030-0809323389 Categories: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Description

Using narrative, monologues, and seventy black-and-white photographs, photojournalist Richard Younker examines the life and culture of what’s perhaps the last generation of people to make their living as commercial fishermen on the Mississippi River, Junnie Putman and his friends and family.

            

Younker delves into and illustrates every aspect of Putman’s life: how he works, what he does to loosen up, how he interacts with friends and family. He shows how Putman fished, divulging one of the crucial secrets of the professional fisherman. Examining this fisherman’s life—in addition to the lives of his relatives and friends—Younker demonstrates Putman’s skill as colorful storyteller with a rich vocabulary. Putman proved forthright when expressing his views about life, river lore, and the changing ecology.

            

These fishermen (who supplement their incomes by hunting and trapping) have more than a few and vigorous encounters with the law, some confrontational, some clever. They also live dangerous lives, working hard, playing hard. And they’re quick to fight. Younker photographs and writes about this side of their lives, too.

            

In every chapter, Younker narrates an aspect of the life and work of Junnie Putman and his friends and family followed byYounker’s own black-and-white photographs that help tell the story. Introducing every photograph is a monologue in which Putman or one of his relatives either recounts the history of the family that settled in Bellevue, Iowa, in 1862 or explains the methods and dangers of a specific job.

    

Although he spent parts of nine years documenting Junnie Putman and his family, Younker condenses his observations into a single year. He shows, for example, how fishing techniques change with the seasons. Putman uses hoop nets in the spring, trotlines in the summertime, trammel nets in the fall, seines in the open water in late fall, and seines under the water in winter.

       

In Yankin’ and Liftin’ Their Whole Lives, Younker presents the richness of a vanishing way of living and the intricacies of its labors. He gives Junnie Putman and his friends the opportunity to speak for themselves. And he shows a culture in decline, demonstrating that descent through Putman’s failing health, his death, and the townspeople’s reminiscences of his life following the funeral.


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