Books like The Most Southern Place on Earth — picked by fans

This is a comprehensive history of the Mississippi River in general and the Flood of 1927 in particular. Beautifully written and exhaustively researched, it was incredibly insightful and full of context, especially about the relations between the ruling-class planters and their African American workers. The influx of Italian, Lebanese, and Chinese immigrants is detailed and explains much of the Delta's cultural diversity.

The book also tells the story of the government’s response to the devastating flood, ultimately propelling Secretary of Commerce Herbert Hoover to the presidency in 1928.

The story of American music is laid out in a fascinating series of stories by musicologist and former New York Times music critic Robert Palmer. Palmer used interviews with Muddy Waters and many other bluesmen to explain how this music traveled from Africa to the American South and then up to Chicago, Detroit, and other northern cities.

It is an in-depth look at the stories and myths of the South and the people who made their escape from the brutal cotton fields and racial segregation of the times. This book is a must for anyone wanting to know the beginnings and significance of American music.

Even though this is a collection of short stories, it tells the story of Mississippi and the South in a way few have captured. I have recommended this book to dozens of people over the years who were looking to begin reading Mr. Faulkner’s work.

The stories about Native American culture (Red Leaves, A Justice, and Lo) are insightful and completely changed my thinking about that culture. The stories of small-town life come alive in unique and disturbing ways, but they are always inventive and deep. I love these stories and the fact that even after eighty or ninety years, they continue to introduce one of the greatest writers in the English language to the people of the world.

William Alexander Percy was an enigma. He was an attorney, a published poet, a World War I hero, and a ruling member of the planter class during his life in the Mississippi Delta (1885-1942). His father was a United States Senator, and his mother was French Catholic, a fact that riled the KKK members in 1920s Mississippi.

Percy is recognized as a godfather to the Southern Agrarians Robert Penn Warren, John Crowe Ransom, and Allen Tate. This is a look back to a strange time in America. Some of the languages, especially those discussing race, are hard to read, but at the time, they were considered ultra-liberal. This book sets up much of the context needed to understand the significance of the Mississippi Delta.

After reading David Hackett’s book, I cannot think of American society in the same way again. The United States is touted as the great melting pot, but we all know that cultural nuggets may refuse to mix thoroughly with the rest. What I learned from this book is that even within white Angle-America, behavior patterns that differentiated Englishmen hundreds of years ago persist in America today. This book is not about red states and blue states, but it is impossible to read it and not see the connections.

Hackett traces the colonial immigration of four populations who settled the colonies–New England Puritans, Quakers and others of the Middle Colonies, Cavaliers of the South, and the Scotch-Irish of the Appalachian back-country. They differed significantly in geographic origins, speech, architecture, family structure and values, gender roles, food, dress, work patterns, and the concept of freedom.

Those differences are still with us and… show more.

A History of Knowledge is a treasure that invites everyone to explore and enjoy. It recounts the history of human progress from primitive times to the 21st century. Van Doren covers the history of ideas, inventions, civilizations, ideologies, and issues of justice, war, and slavery. Almost no famous thinker, emperor, philosopher, inventor, or artist is not mentioned, and his contribution examined. These are two of my favorite quotations; “Our fathers started the revolution, and we are still living it. We could not stop it even if we wanted to.” “The rich are never rich enough... to have enough is simply to be content with what you have. When wanting comes first, you can never have enough. If contentment is placed first, it does not matter how much you have.”

Juan Villoro’s memoir takes readers on a tour of contemporary Mexico City that is also a meditation on chilangos’ (Mexico City residents) relationship with the past. The book bounces between the author’s childhood in the neighborhoods of Mixcoac and Del Valle and the present day, traversing the sprawling metropolis and giving readers a sense of its scale and complexity. Through Villoro, we meet the sewer cleaners and tire repairmen who keep the city humming. We visit monuments like the Angel of Independence and Chapultepec Castle and the bustling spaces of Santo Domingo Plaza and Tepito—places that seem to hover between past and present and myth and reality. At once spry and erudite, the book is an immensely satisfying rumination on the city and its people. 

Gerard’s reflections on a fractured America resonate so deeply with me.

He writes with the same kind of searching spirit I tried to bring to my book: an effort to find a moral center in a world that often seems to have lost its way.

Gerard’s book helped me see that even when everything feels like it’s falling apart, there are still spaces for wonder and decency to take root. And that’s what keeps me writing—and hoping.

This 1974 book, by the founder of one of the world’s great picture libraries, was a real eye-opener to me when I first read it. We are all nostalgic and look at the past through rose-tinted glasses, and so do I. But then we forget about the hunger and the crime, tuberculosis, smallpox and heaps of trash on the streets, the child labor, and the despair of the aged. This richly illustrated book, with its multitude of stories, set me straight. For instance, did you know that New York had 150,000 horses in 1900, each producing around 20 pounds of manure a day? The past stank. It makes you deeply grateful for science, technology, and economic growth.

Didion's inability to make sense of America in the fracturing, turbulent mid-century years struck me as spookily familiar.

Many of the essays in this collection are personal, about herself; she was a cool and incisive observer, not a participant. But the pervasive atmosphere of disaffection and alarm she depicts drove many, including me, to take enormous risks for ill-conceived reasons.

She profiles one dreamer who found it shockingly easy to abdicate responsibility for making delusional choices: Linda Kasabian, who joined the murderous Manson Family, conned by its leader's charisma, and his promises of love and some vague idyllic future, into forgetting that actions can have fatal consequences.