Chad Pregracke’s excellent new book, From the Bottom Up, is a young man’s memoir about cleaning up rivers, but it’s also a powerful bildungsroman navigating a clash of ancient and modern worlds.

Pregracke used to work full days walking along the bottom of the Mississippi river breathing out of a hose and picking up mussels. This job paid well for a teenager and had the added benefit of terrifying his mother. One day he got frustrated by the amount of trash in the water and tried to clean some of it up. He wound up running an internationally acclaimed nonprofit organization.

Pregracke takes us on many journeys at once in this gripping memoir. We join him as he cleans the river he grew up on, but the real work is in learning how many people he will need help from along the way, and learning how to talk to them.

Photograph of Chad Pregracke courtesy of National Geographic.