Life on the Mississippi: An Epic American Adventure

by Rinker Buck Narrated by Jason Culp

Overview

Notes From Your Bookseller

Rinker Buck, author of the bestselling book The Oregon Trail, sets off on another adventure, this time going down the Mississippi River on a flatboat. Life on the Mississippi interlaces Buck’s own experience traveling down the river with earlier travels, with Buck challenging the brutality behind the westward movement. Blending historical narratives with his own sense of adventure, Buck creates a remarkable story that sheds a light on the history of the Mississippi River.

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.

Editorial Reviews

Publishers Weekly

06/13/2022

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. (Aug.)

From the Publisher

PRAISE FOR LIFE ON THE MISSISSIPPI:

“Audacious . . . Compelling . . . An antidote to the cynicism of the times . . . Life on the Mississippi sparkles. . . . His prose, like the river itself, has turns that quicken the pulse.”
—Wall Street Journal

“An invigorating blend of history and journalism informs this journey down Old Man River. . . . Besides being a willing and intrepid traveler, Buck is also an able interpreter of history, and it’s clear that he’s devoured a library of Mississippiana. It all makes for an entertaining journey in the manner of William Least Heat-Moon, John McPhee, and other traveler-explainers. For armchair-travel aficionados and frontier-history buffs, it doesn’t get much better.”
—Kirkus Reviews (starred review), “Best Nonfiction Books of 2022”

“Engaging . . . [Buck is] a travel writer who delights in incongruity and in history’s rhymes.”
—New York Times

“A rich mix of history, reporting, and personal introspection . . . I see Buck at the helm of the Patience when I read Twain’s description of a riverboat captain: ‘A pilot, in those days, was the only unfettered and entirely independent human being that lived on the earth.’”
—St. Louis Post-Dispatch

“Rinker Buck seems like a guy you could sit down and have a beer and a good chat with. . . . The simplest conversation quickly turns into a master class of storytelling in short form. . . . Life on the Mississippi [is] an epic tale told with wit, wisdom and heart-touching honesty. . . . What the book will certainly do is give readers an up-close look at the waters so few of us see.”
—Gulf Coast Media

“Captivating . . . 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.”
—Publishers Weekly

“[A] riveting, revealing, and often side-splitting saga that Oregon Trail fans would expect it to be. . . . Rollicking good reading.”
—New York Journal of Books

“Buck’s ability to deftly balance the intimate and the epic, along with his pervading charm and literary panache, make Life on the Mississippi an entertaining and engrossing read. . . . The book’s most poignant aspect is achieved thanks to the author’s ability to sketch brief, affecting portraits of the people with whom his voyage brings him into contact.”
—Shelf Awareness, “Best Nonfiction Books of 2022”

“Both a travelogue and an engaging history lesson about America’s westward expansion after the Revolutionary War . . . It’s a mark of Buck’s ability to write engagingly of his journey that many readers will conclude that a trip down the Mississippi would be a romantic adventure and a wonderful chance to learn about America’s history.”
—Christian Science Monitor, “Best Nonfiction Books of 2022”

“Life on the Mississippi is a fascinating mix of history and travelogue. . . . Buck shines a light on an important yet forgotten part of American history and shows its relevance to today’s America.”
—American Essence

Library Journal

07/01/2022

This book tells the story of journalist Buck's (The Oregon Trail; Flight of Passage) quest to sail a flatboat 2000 miles down the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers from Pittsburgh to New Orleans with a varied crew and many helpers along the way. As the adventurous Buck writes, this four-month journey traced the inland water route often taken in the years between the American Revolution and Civil War. The narrative works as a memoir, a history treatise, and a travel adventure. The author comes to terms with his mother's death on this journey, but he also places his traveling adventures into a broader historical framework of how flatboats epitomized frontier resilience and ingenuity. Simultaneously, he also explores modern politics and culture, reflects on economic realities both past and present, and considers both ugly and uplifting aspects of American history. VERDICT The author's use of cited local history books in libraries along his journey gives the book a strong factual basis as a history text, and his incorporation of literary words from writers of the flatboat era infuse his own writing with humor and poetic charm. Highly recommended for all libraries.—Karen Bordonaro

AUGUST 2022 - AudioFile

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

Kirkus Reviews

★ 2022-05-10
An invigorating blend of history and journalism informs this journey down Old Man River.

Buck walks the walk, or perhaps rows the row: As with his previous book on the Oregon Trail, he follows the path of preceding generations in the hope of seeing something of what they saw. That’s not easy in the case of the Mississippi River, which, along with one of its principal tributaries, the Ohio, is “jointly managed by the U.S. Coast Guard and the Army Corps of Engineers exclusively for the benefit of commercial barge traffic.” With those massive strings of barges, some as many as 25 containers long, clogging the river, traversing it by means of an old-fashioned wooden flatboat seems an invitation to disaster. Yet that’s just what Buck did, building his own craft in the manner of the 19th-century pioneers who saw in the river system a means of knitting far-flung territories into a nation. Building the boat was a challenge, and the author “would shortly learn that the flatboat was indeed an ideal school for acquiring a knowledge of human nature.” Buck populates his invigorating narrative with a memorable cast of characters, some people who traveled with him, some people he met along the way. The author was courtly to all of them, save a loudmouth Trumper who “considered it absolutely vital to explain to me that the ‘’nited states of ’merica’ was being ruined by ‘librals and buree-cats.’ ” Buck’s adventures alternate between nearly being swamped by massive commercial vessels and dealing with more mundane disasters; as he noted to his first mate, “Clusterfuck is our new normal.” Besides being a willing and intrepid traveler, Buck is also an able interpreter of history, and it’s clear that he’s devoured a library of Mississippiana. It all makes for an entertaining journey in the manner of William Least Heat-Moon, John McPhee, and other traveler-explainers.

For armchair-travel aficionados and frontier-history buffs, it doesn’t get much better.

Product Details

BN ID:	2940176062649
Publisher:	Simon & Schuster
Publication date:	08/09/2022
Edition description:	Unabridged

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