About the Author

After three years with the U.S. Peace Corps in Nepal, Patrick Livingston began a twenty-five-year career as an agent with the Michigan State University Extension and Michigan Sea Grant. During that period, he helped initiate several educational programs including the Great Lakes Heritage Program, the Michigan 4H Great Lakes Natural Resources Camp, and the Great Lakes Education Program. He is currently involved with the Seti River Education Program linking teachers from Nepal and Michigan with water quality analysis and information sharing.

Reviews

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

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. The edited is solid. Wayne State University Press has added another worthy title to its Great Lakes Book series."-- "International Journal of Maritime History"

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"