Eight Steamboats: Sailing Through the Sixties
Patrick Livingston
Great Lakes Books Series
Price: $31.95
Order Book
“Eight Steamboats invites us to take a return voyage to Detroit during the turbulent 1960s. It wasn’t always smooth sailing, but Patrick Livingston’s unique perspective definitely makes it a journey worth repeating.”
—Harvey Ovshinsky, former editor and publisher of The Fifth Estate
“Livingston’s book makes a monumental contribution to furthering our understanding of what it was actually like to live and work aboard ship on the Great Lakes during the 1960s. While Livingston’s colorful account of life as a crewmember on the passenger steamers and freighters of the 1960s makes Eight Steamboats a valuable addition to the existing literature about Great Lakes shipping, his insights into campus life, the antiwar movement, and the drug culture are frosting on the cake.”
—Mark Thompson, author and maritime historian
“An experience of a young man going down to the sea, Patrick Livingston’s Eight Steamboats is a voyage of self-discovery and a coming-of-age. The experience was life-shaping. The fights, the nights on the town, the union halls, and the hard labor expected of Great Lakes sailors is meticulously and sometimes hilariously recounted. The pace is rapid. . . . An exciting voyage through the Great Lakes, and life.”
—Timothy J. Runyan, director of the Maritime Studies Program, East Carolina University
“If you can’t get enough of firsthand adventures on Great Lakes steamboats, this is definitely the book for you. Patrick Livingston relates his early introduction to, and fascination with, the Lakes and their ships and how he came to sail. A very personal look at the Great Lakes shipping industry during a time of great change for the industry and the world.”
—Inland Seas: Quarterly Journal of the Great Lakes Historical Society
“Livingston has raised the bar with this book length treatment of five summers (plus the odd fall and spring) on the Lakes. Unlike much of the shipping literature, this is a people-oriented book. . . . Wayne State University Press has added another worthy title to its Great Lakes Book series.”
—International Journal of Maritime History
Awards received: A 2005 Michigan Notable Book.