The Great River

“Gives readers a direct sensory encounter with the beauty and boldness of the river….[T]ells an eloquent story of the ways the Mississippi River is a separate world, hidden in plain sight.” – Ralph Eubanks - The Washington Post“Examines the Mississippi’s tortuous history, from its geological origins to the present day, with particular attention on our long struggle to mold the river for our own purposes.” – Gerard Helferich - The Wall Street Journal“The Great River is easily one of the best books ever written about the Mississippi. It brings depth of scholarship to everything from geology to history to current politics, all of it elegantly written.” – John M. Barry, author of Rising Tide: The Great Mississippi Flood of 1927 and How It Changed America“From mound-builders to levee-makers, Boyce Upholt gives us a Mississippi both wild and engineered, life-giving and furious—a river as full of contradictions as the country that has tried and failed to tame it. Impossible to stop reading, The Great River is a deeply felt meditation on the ways people have lived with nature’s changes,and how we might live differently in the future. ” – Bathsheba Demuth, author of Floating Coast: An Environmental History of the Bering Strait

Boyce Upholt is a journalist and essayist whose writing has appeared in the Atlantic, National Geographic, the Oxford American, and Virginia Quarterly Review, among other publications. He is the winner of a James Beard Award for investigative journalism, and he lives in New Orleans, Louisiana.