Customer Reviews

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

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4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(1)
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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!

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!

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.

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.

This is a well-told story of, well, "One Man's Crusade to Clean America's Rivers". Starting from a shoestring budget, a handful of friends, and a defunct local rock band, he grows his operation until it is able to support multiple barges and a floating classroom. It's encouraging to see that one person can make such a difference, even in the face of a patchwork of state and federal laws which make it difficult.

The first half of this book, as he is building his operation and suffering certain setbacks, is the more entertaining. There's even a villain, the game warden of Burlington, who seems intent on stopping Chad with any excuse he can find. By about the midpoint Chad is adept at handling the different situations, and so the theatrical interest of the book is no longer as great, although his accomplishments here are still interesting and important.

Chad has a hilarious response to a room of businessmen when asked what his "political platform" is. This is not a book about politics, or even necessarily about environmentalism. This is a book about a boy who got tired of seeing trash on the river, who became a man capable of fixing it.

"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.

I often find it difficult to concentrate. It has been so bad lately I thought perhaps I was losing my mind. The amount of information we must comprehend today is reaching proportions that are difficult to fathom. I think the reason I have a hard time concentrating and dealing with one issue at a time is because of this phenomena. At least, that is what I am hoping. If only I would use the concepts and rules of David Allen and his book Getting Things Done (which I preach to everyone I meet and see), I could learn to concentrate and rid my mind of superfluous things. Discipline - it takes discipline - I keep telling myself.

So, in the midst of all this mind blitz comes the discovery of a book that describes a man of utter and complete concentration. I would not normally have purchased this book as it would not have interested me laying in the "new" section of our local bookstore. Instead, I picked this book up in my friend's office. He was doing some media work for the local community college who honored the subject of the book in the past week. This book describes a person with a singular goal; someone who has obviously learned to concentrate. This book was so enjoyable to read, it helped me relax and take my mind off of all the issues and problems of the day.

From the Bottom Up: One Man's Crusade to Clean America's Rivers is a story by Chad Pregracke and Jeff Barrow about the creation and development of the Living Lands and Waters Foundation and Chad Pregracke's singlemindedness about cleaning up rivers. Talk about concentration. Over the past 12 years Pregracke and a whole host of volunteers have cleaned miles and miles of the Mississippi, Ohio, Illinois and Missouri rivers in the Midwest. In addition, Pregracke has journeyed to our nation's capital to clean up the garbage along the Potomac and Anacostia Rivers. Recognized by national and regional organizations for the work he has done, Pregracke has always ventured back to the river he loves and his goal to clean it up.

What impressed me so much about this story - also the story of entrepreneurs and others who achieve - is the relentless, insistent pursuit of his goal. Pregracke was not going to take no for an answer. Every time he turned around he was calling major corporations, federal agencies, local governments and major institutional environmental groups and simply asking them for help, money, volunteers, places to park boats and barges and cooperation. He is a simple person with a simple purpose: cleaning up the river. There is so much for everyone to learn about his story. The themes in this book and the story behind Pregracke are many but simple: Persistence pays off, be in the right place at the right time, work hard and good things will come to you, never take no for an answer, lead by example, stay focused, collaboration is the key and, finally, "there is credit for everyone."

Pregracke's story is interesting to me because many of the places he talks about along the Mississippi and Illinois rivers are familiar places to me. While I grew up about two hours away from the Mississippi, I have always recognized its importance, beauty and significance in the American lexicon of history and commerce. In my youth, my family would take trips to Winona, Minnesota to visit friends, and the thrill was always crossing the Mississippi. In high school my friends and I would often venture to Dubuque, Iowa, crossing the frozen Mississippi to go skiing at a local resort (yes, there is a ski hill in Iowa!). In college, I would take US 51 and cross the Illinois River on the old steel bridge at LaSalle-Peru many times going to and from home. As an adult I have visited Starved Rock State Park, Mississippi Palisades, St. Louis, crossed the Ohio at Paducah, and many of the other locations mentioned in the book. The narrative of the landscape and scenes Pregracke and his co-author, Jeff Barrow, describe in the book are places I recognize and love.

The importance of the Mississippi as one of the world's major rivers was driven home to me when I was working with a delegation of government and business officials from Kazakhstan in 1995 in Rockford, Illinois. Through their Russian language interpreter I was describing the virtues of our fair city and the advantages of conducting trade with local companies, when during a lunch break one burly bear of a man came up to me, and in perfect English said to me, "So, how far is the Mississippi from here?" Shocked by his command of the language and impressed that he knew we were pretty close, I indicated we were not far, perhaps two hours. He quickly stressed his desire to see "one of the greatest rivers of the world" and in what amounted to a quick bark of stern Russian, said something to one of his "escorts" or handlers. A stern reply came right back at him. As he turned back to me I offered to drive him the next day (Saturday) to the big river, if he really wanted to see it, and deliver him to Chicago the next day. It was clear, however, the Russian handler was not going to loosen any restrictions and let him deviate from his centrally-planned schedule. Too bad for Boris. He was not going to see the Mississippi, but I was impressed nevertheless that he knew and understood the magnitude and scope of this mighty river.

Cleaning up the river in the manner that Pregracke and his cohorts conduct their effort is impressive. Starting with trucks and dumpsters in the first several years and graduating to barges, tugboats and water-borne classrooms in later years Pregracke has honed and developed a sophisticated technique and method for cleaning the river. Working their way up the river starting on the Ohio each year, his crew, which often changes each year, hauls tons of garbage from the rivers of the Midwest. In the beginning, that is all they did. Refrigerators, barrels, cars, abandoned boats - everything one could think of - was hauled out of the river. While the book describes in great detail the amount and volume of the garbage collected, I am sure no one can imagine the enormity of it all unless one was there to witness it. The book is written in first-person narrative form, and the level of detail allowed me to be right there with Pregracke and his crew walking through the muck, diving after sunken boats and being sore after a long hard day's work. The level of detail leaves some to think that Pregracke either has a tremendous memory or journals his activities each year, but the book doesn't really describe how we come to know all the minute details of his story. Maybe I'm just jealous that Pregracke can remember things from six years ago, and I can't remember what I ate for breakfast yesterday.

Pregracke is the guy who doesn't know enough not to ask the impossible question. No one told him he couldn't ask the Army Corps of Engineers to lease a couple of barges. No one told him he couldn't ask Anheuser-Busch, Alcoa, Cargill, Honda or any number of barge companies, freight companies or others for donations, material and equipment. No one told him he couldn't ask local mayors and other government officials for permission to use public property or volunteers. Pregracke is the guy everyone knows who is not necessarily courageous, but so rational (such as thinking "why wouldn't someone want to give me money to clean up the river, they use it, don't they?") that these questions and requests come naturally.

I decided to read this book because I thought with Pregracke's visit to Bloomington-Normal coming up it would be interesting to review a book with some local connection. What I found was a book describing a simple journey, a simple yet powerful journey of one "man" (Pregracke was basically a teenager when he started this project) and a simple project: clean up the river. By focusing on this single goal, he has achieved many great things. He has built awareness of the toll we humans take on our natural treasures; he has developed friendships and coalitions among competing groups who fight for environmental supremacy in their territory; he has simply carried out a task that required a couple boats and some strong backs in the beginning, and has turned it into a national movement with thousands of volunteers.

In the end, Chad Pregracke has been successful because he did one thing very well: he concentrated on a single goal, has never really strayed from that goal and has remained true to his mission. This discipline is something we can take, whether we are running a business, creating a movement or managing a non-profit, and learn from. Pregracke has the ultimate ability to concentrate. I hope I can shed all the mental baggage that has hitched onto my wagon and learn to concentrate again. Pregracke is an inspiration to us all. Concentrate...concentrate.

What Chad Pregrake and his crews are doing is what we should all do. That's a broad statement, I know, but I mean it. This book is an interesting read about how he became involved and how his river clean-up project progressed. It was obviously a lot of hard work accomplished through strong leadership, vision and dedication. I found the book inspirational, readable and informative. Well done.From the Bottom Up: One Man's Crusade to Clean America's Rivers

A book that shows how one person can make a change for the better. He started cleaning by himself and then built a team to take it all to the next step.

After years of trying to live lightly and do the right thing, I still see people throwing trash out of their car windows for Pete's sake! I was starting to think that litter and garbage everywhere was the way we were going to have to live.

Then I saw Chad's story on CBS Sunday Morning and when they mentioned his book, I bought it instantly. What a story. What an uplifting book.

This is easy to read, exciting, funny and incredibly inspiring.

I raced through it and then gave it to my husband to read. When he finished, he asked "when are we going to help Chad? Have you signed us up yet?" What I wouldn't give to meet Chad and help him pick up garbage.

Whether you care about the earth, love rivers and river wildlife or even just like an adventure read, I would highly recommend that you buy this book.