Here are 100 books that Mississippi Solo fans have personally recommended if you like
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I grew up on the Delaware River and took my first canoe trip around 12. Later, in my teens, I worked for a canoe outfitter. During college, I took several longer trips with friends. When a father, I would bring my kids and family along, often with a dog. Later, I would paddle the whole stretch of it, 200 miles from the headwaters to my boyhood home, which I wrote about in my book. To write it, I reread many of these books, including Powell and Graves, who also paddled with his dog. Mine, Sully, joined me on my 9-day trip.
McPhee refers to the “gin-clear” water of Alaskan rivers, and his prose is equally lucid. It is also dense with facts, each sentence packed like a canoe or loaded raft. Serialized in the New Yorker in the 1970s, the “The Encircled River” section describes his canoe journey down a 60-mile segment of Salmon River, the most northern river above the Arctic Circle.
With four others who worked for the U.S. government, they studied the river as a national wild river Congress would be voting on to become part of the Kobuk Valley National Monument. The legislation passed under Jimmy Carter on December 2, 1980. Pair with his Survival of a Birch Bark Canoe.
Coming into the Country is an unforgettable account of Alaska and Alaskans. It is a rich tapestry of vivid characters, observed landscapes, and descriptive narrative, in three principal segments that deal, respectively, with a total wilderness, with urban Alaska, and with life in the remoteness of the bush.
Readers of McPhee's earlier books will not be unprepared for his surprising shifts of scene and ordering of events, brilliantly combined into an organic whole. In the course of this volume we are made acquainted with the lore and techniques of placer mining, the habits and legends of the barren-ground grizzly, the…
The Victorian mansion, Evenmere, is the mechanism that runs the universe.
The lamps must be lit, or the stars die. The clocks must be wound, or Time ceases. The Balance between Order and Chaos must be preserved, or Existence crumbles.
Appointed the Steward of Evenmere, Carter Anderson must learn the…
I grew up on the Delaware River and took my first canoe trip around 12. Later, in my teens, I worked for a canoe outfitter. During college, I took several longer trips with friends. When a father, I would bring my kids and family along, often with a dog. Later, I would paddle the whole stretch of it, 200 miles from the headwaters to my boyhood home, which I wrote about in my book. To write it, I reread many of these books, including Powell and Graves, who also paddled with his dog. Mine, Sully, joined me on my 9-day trip.
It is an unforgettable journey of a man (with a dog) paddling down a wild river (the Brazos) about to be flattened into a lake by a dam. The voice is weary and troubled at times but leavened with a curiosity about the natural world and the people he meets. Was he ever bored on the three-week journey?
“You’re no more bored with the sameness of your days and your diet and your task than a chickadee is bored, the passenger on the sunny bow, or a catfish; each day has its fullness, bracketed by sleep.”
In the 1950s, a series of dams was proposed along the Brazos River in north-central Texas. For John Graves, this project meant that if the stream’s regimen was thus changed, the beautiful and sometimes brutal surrounding countryside would also change, as would the lives of the people whose rugged ancestors had eked out an existence there. Graves therefore decided to visit that stretch of the river, which he had known intimately as a youth.
Goodbye to a Riveris his account of that farewell canoe voyage. As he braves rapids and fatigue and the fickle autumn weather, he muses upon old…
I grew up on the Delaware River and took my first canoe trip around 12. Later, in my teens, I worked for a canoe outfitter. During college, I took several longer trips with friends. When a father, I would bring my kids and family along, often with a dog. Later, I would paddle the whole stretch of it, 200 miles from the headwaters to my boyhood home, which I wrote about in my book. To write it, I reread many of these books, including Powell and Graves, who also paddled with his dog. Mine, Sully, joined me on my 9-day trip.
Part scientific expedition, part adventure story, in 1869, the one-armed Civil War veteran descends into the Grand Canyon, the first Euro-American to do so. As the journey progresses down the Colorado and Powell and his men become more fatigued and hungry, his sense of the sublime increases.
Included are amazing wood engravings by artists such as Thomas Moran. Would be good paired with Brave the Wild River, by Melissa Sevigny, about two pioneering women botanists who made the journey in the 1930s to document the canyon’s plant species.
One of the great works of American exploration literature, this account of a scientific expedition forced to survive famine, attacks, mutiny, and some of the most dangerous rapids known to man remains as fresh and exciting today as it was in 1874.
The Exploration of the Colorado River and Its Canyons, recently ranked number four on Adventure magazine’s list of top 100 classics, is legendary pioneer John Wesley Powell’s first-person account of his crew’s unprecedented odyssey along the Green and Colorado Rivers and through the Grand Canyon. A bold foray into the heart of the American West’s final frontier, the…
Magical realism meets the magic of Christmas in this mix of Jewish, New Testament, and Santa stories–all reenacted in an urban psychiatric hospital!
On locked ward 5C4, Josh, a patient with many similarities to Jesus, is hospitalized concurrently with Nick, a patient with many similarities to Santa. The two argue…
There's almost nothing better than getting in a canoe, putting your paddle in the water, and pushing out into a current that will carry you away. As someone who grew up on the Mississippi River, and who has spent much of my life canoeing, I always love a good river journey. And when I can't take one myself. I love going vicariously with someone else, like with these books.
Among those many paddlers inspired by Canoeing with the Cree were Natalie Warren and Ann Raiho, who read the book in college and decided they wanted to do the trip too.
Not long after graduation, they did just that, becoming the first women to paddle Hudson Bay. I love this book because it gives you a real-time glimpse of what it takes to make such a trip, and before long, you're dreaming of your own months-long paddle into the unknown.
The remarkable eighty-five-day journey of the first two women to canoe the 2,000-mile route from Minneapolis to Hudson Bay
Unrelenting winds, carnivorous polar bears, snake nests, sweltering heat, and constant hunger. Paddling from Minneapolis to Hudson Bay, following the 2,000-mile route made famous by Eric Sevareid in his 1935 classic Canoeing with the Cree, Natalie Warren and Ann Raiho faced unexpected trials, some harrowing, some simply odd. But for the two friends-the first women to make this expedition-there was one timeless challenge: the occasional pitfalls that test character and friendship. Warren's spellbinding account retraces the women's journey from inspiration to…
By chance, I was entrusted with rare historical documents about the immigrant generations in our family, which inspired this novel and grounded it in reality. Who wouldn’t wonder why they came? Besides, I have always been fascinated by pre-modern times and how steam power changed everything and dragged us along, kicking and screaming. And, even though they arrived in America in 1836, I grew up on the farm where they lived, so I heard tales of their amazing journey. It may be 186 years on, but it’s time to tell their story, which, it turns out, is a story for us all.
As a teenager, Abraham Lincoln built a flatboat and floated down the Mississippi to New Orleans to sell the produce his family and neighbors had grown. This and a similar trip three years later were his only exposure to the Deep South. They immersed him in a culture of riverboat men that was archetypical of the era and included events that became part of the mythology surrounding him, an attack by runaway slaves that could have killed him, and his rescue of fellow boatman from drowning. Campanella is a university professor, tireless researcher, and excellent writer.
In 1828, a teenaged Abraham Lincoln guided a flatboat down the Mississippi River to New Orleans. The adventure marked his first visit to a major city and exposed him to the nation's largest slave marketplace. It also nearly cost him his life, in a nighttime attack in the Louisiana plantation country. That trip, and a second one in 1831, would form the two longest journeys of Lincoln's life, his only visits to the Deep South, and his foremost experience in a racially, culturally, and linguistically diverse urban environment.
Lincoln in New Orleans: The 1828-1831 Flatboat Voyages and Their Place in…
To me, it seemed the ancient mounds were fertile ground for literary exploration, a living metaphor – evidence of what was likely the first places of spiritual practice in our country, ancient, unknown, and buried, what a symbol to form the basis of a novel! When I began my research, I soon came into contact with the Natchez. I attended their annual gathering and eventually became close friends with the Principal Chief of the Natchez Nation, who vetted Sacred Mounds and wrote its foreword. The book includes historical figures like the Great Sun, descended from the Sun Itself, and his war chief, the Tattooed Serpent. They are part of the tapestry of history woven in Sacred Mounds.
This is another classic, chock full of archaeological descriptions, along with prints of early mounds and artifacts. It’s prime source material, with first-person accounts of those who first discovered and excavated the mounds. Originally published by the Smithsonian Institution in 1848 it remains an important reference on the mounds, a veritable time capsule of maps, illustrations, and accounts of early explorers.
The fact of the existence, within the valley of the Mississippi river and its tributaries, of many ancient monuments of human labor and skill, seems to have escaped the notice of the adventurers who first made known to the world the extent and fertility of that vast region. Except some incidental allusions by La Vega, and the Portuguese chronicler of De Soto's unfortunate expedition, to structures bearing some analogy to those of the West, (and which seem to have been occupied, if they were not built, by the Indians of Florida,) we find no mention made of these monuments by…
A Duke with rigid opinions, a Lady whose beliefs conflict with his, a long disputed parcel of land, a conniving neighbour, a desperate collaboration, a failure of trust, a love found despite it all.
Alexander Cavendish, Duke of Ravensworth, returned from war to find that his father and brother had…
I am a historian of race and slavery in the lower Mississippi Valley because the region is a fulcrum of United States history. I was always fascinated by the significance of the Mississippi River for American expansion, society, and culture. Ultimately, this region of the country is so deeply influenced by people of African descent that must be included in all histories, and I wanted to share their stories in a particular place during the colonial period. Telling these stories in places where they have commonly been less well represented is very rewarding and it opens more ways to understand the histories of places like Natchez along the Mississippi River.
Gwendolyn Hall’s Africans in Colonial Louisianais still a foundational text when it comes to studying African people in the colonial lower Mississippi Valley. Her deep knowledge of the archives and skill in bringing the stories of enslaved Africans to live make this a wonderfully informative book. She draws deep connections between the places that Africans left and their forced new homes in Louisiana, while placing a special emphasis on how that culture turned into an African creole culture in the lower Mississippi Valley.
Although a number of important studies of American slavery have explored the formation of slave cultures in the English colonies, few books have undertaken a comprehensive assessment of the development of the distinctive African-Creole culture of colonial Louisiana. This culture, based upon a separate language community with its own folklore, musical, religious and historical traditions, was created by slaves brought directly from Africa to Louisiana before 1731. It still survives as the acknowledged cultural heritage of tens of thousands of people of all races in the southern part of the state. In this work, Gwendolyn Hall studies Louisiana's Creole slave…
DeAnne Blanton retired from the National Archives in Washington, DC after 31 years of service as a reference archivist specializing in 18th and 19th century U.S. Army records. She was recognized within the National Archives as well as in the historical and genealogical communities as a leading authority on the American Civil War; 19th century women’s history; and the history of American women in the military.
When Lauren Cook and I published They Fought Like Demons, we knew that our book, although groundbreaking, was only the tip of the iceberg in the story of women soldiers in the Civil War, and we always hoped that another scholar would pick up the torch and move the story forward. Shelby Harriel has done just that. Behind the Rifle is a meticulously researched and ably written account of the distaff soldiers who hailed from Mississippi, or found themselves there. Citing previously unknown sources along with revealing newly-located photographs, Harriel’s contribution to the history of women soldiers is remarkable.
During the Civil War, Mississippi's strategic location bordering the Mississippi River and the state's system of railroads drew the attention of opposing forces who clashed in major battles for control over these resources. The names of these engagements-Vicksburg, Jackson, Port Gibson, Corinth, Iuka, Tupelo, and Brice's Crossroads-along with the narratives of the men who fought there resonate in Civil War literature. However, Mississippi's chronicle of military involvement in the Civil War is not one of men alone. Surprisingly, there were a number of female soldiers disguised as males who stood shoulder to shoulder with them on the firing lines across…
Genre fiction and Robert Louis Stevenson aside, I can’t imagine loving a novel that has no strong thread, or threads, of love running through it. Fiction is written to entertain, it is true, but fiction’s higher aim is to put us in touch with our own humanity—our capacity to love, and to feel loss. We write to make people feel, and a powerful evocation of love will do that. I wouldn’t write a novel with no romantic love at its center, but I work hard too at love between siblings, friends, children, and parents.
Great characters drive great novels, and the cast of Huck Finn is as rich, varied, idiosyncratic, and vivid as any in literature. Some will make you laugh, some will make you angry, some will touch your heart. This is America’s best book, as Ernest Hemingway famously said, and if you haven’t read it, you’ve deprived yourself.
Chafed by the "sivilized" restrictions of his foster home, and weary of his drunkard father's brutality, Huck Finn fakes his own death and sets off on a raft down the Mississippi River. He is soon joined by Jim, an escaped slave. Together, they experience a series of rollicking adventures that have amused readers, young and old, for over a century. The fugitives become close friends as they weather storms together aboard the raft and spend idyllic days swimming, frying catfish suppers, and enjoying their independence. Their peaceful existence comes to…
It is April 1st, 2038. Day 60 of China's blockade of the rebel island of Taiwan.
The US government has agreed to provide Taiwan with a weapons system so advanced that it can disrupt the balance of power in the region. But what pilot would be crazy enough to run…
I’m a historian of science fascinated by how scientists cope with uncertainty. I’m drawn to books that identify and try to explain the gaps in scientific knowledge and describe ways of knowing that might not be called scientific. I love to read stories about how ordinary people discover extraordinary things about their environments. I’m always curious about what happens when savvy locals are visited by scientific experts. Will they join forces? Admit what they don’t know? Or is a struggle brewing?
Amazingly, the seismic disasters that this book documents, which took place in the middle of the United States in the nineteenth century, have been almost entirely forgotten by scientists and planners.
How can earthquakes remake an entire region, physically and socially—and yet to be erased from history within two generations? This is a mind-boggling story about the short attention span of those entrusted to protect against environmental destruction.
From December 1811 to February 1812, massive earthquakes shook the middle Mississippi Valley, collapsing homes, snapping large trees midtrunk, and briefly but dramatically reversing the flow of the continent's mightiest river. For decades, people puzzled over the causes of the quakes, but by the time the nation began to recover from the Civil War, the New Madrid earthquakes had been essentially forgotten. In The Lost History of the New Madrid Earthquakes, Conevery Bolton Valencius remembers this major environmental disaster, demonstrating how events that have been long forgotten, even denied and ridiculed as tall tales, were in fact enormously important at…
