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Title details for Life on the Mississippi by Rinker Buck - Wait list

Life on the Mississippi

An Epic American Adventure

by Rinker Buck
Jason Culp
Audiobook
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NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER * "Audacious...Life on the Mississippi sparkles." —The Wall Street Journal * "A rich mix of history, reporting, and personal introspection." —St. Louis Post-Dispatch * "Both a travelogue and an engaging history lesson about America's westward expansion." —The Christian Science Monitor

The eagerly awaited return of master American storyteller Rinker Buck, Life on the Mississippi is an epic, enchanting blend of history and adventure in which Buck builds a wooden flatboat from the grand "flatboat era" of the 1800s and sails it down the Mississippi River, illuminating the forgotten past of America's first western frontier.
Seven years ago, readers around the country fell in love with a singular American voice: Rinker Buck, whose infectious curiosity about history launched him across the West in a covered wagon pulled by mules and propelled his book about the trip, The Oregon Trail, to ten weeks on the New York Times bestseller list. Now, Buck returns to chronicle his latest incredible adventure: building a wooden flatboat from the bygone era of the early 1800s and journeying down the Mississippi River to New Orleans.

A modern-day Huck Finn, Buck casts off down the river on the flatboat Patience accompanied by an eccentric crew of daring shipmates. Over the course of his voyage, Buck steers his fragile wooden craft through narrow channels dominated by massive cargo barges, rescues his first mate gone overboard, sails blindly through fog, breaks his ribs not once but twice, and camps every night on sandbars, remote islands, and steep levees. As he charts his own journey, he also delivers a richly satisfying work of history that brings to life a lost era.

The role of the flatboat in our country's evolution is far more significant than most Americans realize. Between 1800 and 1840, millions of farmers, merchants, and teenage adventurers embarked from states like Pennsylvania and Virginia on flatboats headed beyond the Appalachians to Kentucky, Mississippi, and Louisiana. Settler families repurposed the wood from their boats to build their first cabins in the wilderness; cargo boats were broken apart and sold to build the boomtowns along the water route. Joining the river traffic were floating brothels, called "gun boats"; "smithy boats" for blacksmiths; even "whiskey boats" for alcohol. In the present day, America's inland rivers are a superhighway dominated by leviathan barges—carrying $80 billion of cargo annually—all descended from flatboats like the ramshackle Patience.

As a historian, Buck resurrects the era's adventurous spirit, but he also challenges familiar myths about American expansion, confronting the bloody truth behind settlers' push for land and wealth. The Indian Removal Act of 1830 forced more than 125,000 members of the Cherokee, Choctaw, and several other tribes to travel the Mississippi on a brutal journey en route to the barrens of Oklahoma. Simultaneously, almost a million enslaved African Americans were carried in flatboats and marched by foot 1,000 miles over the Appalachians to the cotton and cane fields of Arkansas, Mississippi, and Louisiana, birthing the term "sold down the river." Buck portrays this watershed era of American expansion as it was really lived.

With a rare narrative power that blends stirring adventure with absorbing untold history, Life on the Mississippi is a mus­cular and majestic feat of storytelling from a writer who may be the closest that we have today to Mark Twain.

  • Creators

  • Publisher

  • Release date

    August 9, 2022

  • Formats

    • OverDrive Listen audiobook

      • ISBN: 9781797141374
      • File size: 442486 KB
      • Duration: 15:21:50

  • Languages

    • English

  • Reviews

    • AudioFile Magazine
      Flatboats were once the most common craft on America's great rivers, but when Rinker Buck took his down the Monongahela, Ohio, and Mississippi to New Orleans in 2016--as he recounts in this audiobook--it was an object of considerable curiosity. Narrated by Jason Culp, his story of that trip weaves together the history of America and the towns along the rivers, as well as the early migrations into and through the Mississippi basin. Despite the frequent warnings of "you're gonna die" that Buck and his crew garnered, there is little high adventure for Culp to work with, so he smoothly follows the boat downriver and the author's meditations on history, navigation, and human nature. He is quite proficient with regional accents. D.M.H. © AudioFile 2022, Portland, Maine
    • Publisher's Weekly

      June 13, 2022
      Journalist Buck, who documented his travels by covered wagon in The Oregon Trail, returns with a captivating and occasionally cantankerous account of the 2,000-mile, four-month flatboat journey he made in 2016 down the Ohio and Mississippi rivers from Pittsburgh to New Orleans. Inspired by Pennsylvania farmer Jacob Yarder, whose 1782 expedition to Louisiana helped launch the flatboat era, and Harlan and Anna Hubbard, married artists who documented their own seven-year journey down the Ohio and Mississippi rivers in the 1944 book Shantytown: A River Way of Life, Buck built his own flatboat and assembled a politically and geographically diverse crew to help navigate it down some of the most treacherous waters in America. Throughout, he interweaves intriguing discussions of U.S. political, cultural, and economic history with sharp critiques of “traditional historians” who neglect “the hardscrabble, edgy lives of most 19th-century Americans,” reveries on how the light reflects off riverine landscapes, and tense accounts of modern hazards, including extensive lock-and-dam systems and barge traffic. He also draws memorable sketches of local characters he meets along the way, and offers fascinating tidbits about Newburgh, Ind.; New Madrid, Mo.; and other river towns. Rough-edged, well informed, and honest about his own blind spots, Buck is a winning tour guide. American history buffs and armchair adventurers will relish the trip.

    • Library Journal

      June 10, 2024

      The 2016 flatboat voyage down the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers to New Orleans, aboard the Patience, and journalist Buck's (The Oregon Trail) hunger for researching and sharing American history pilot this narrative. The extensively detailed text is more of a scenic cruise through yesteryear than a modern travelogue, as each chapter provides cited historical anecdotes coinciding with and complementing his nautical location. Listeners learn the history of the flatboat era at the onset of the trip, the rise and fall of the coal industry when traveling through the Ohio valley region, and as the rivers merge, the significance of U.S. exporting that the Ohio-Mississippi River confluence at Cairo, IL, holds. The chapters are so steeped in historical miscellany, however, that high-seas adventure lacks. Buck's retelling of the journey primarily focuses on navigating around extensive barge lines and interacting with his itinerant crew and local folks from the riverfront towns. Prolific narrator Jason Culp (Walk in My Combat Boots) competently delivers. VERDICT For libraries with healthy history collections and those who enjoy 19th-century U.S. history and the Ohio and Mississippi River regions.--Kym Goering

      Copyright 2024 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

Formats

  • OverDrive Listen audiobook

subjects

Languages

  • English

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