Boyce Upholt- The Great River

Speaking of Writers

For thousands of years before America’s founding, Native peoples made their homes in the Mississippi watershed, regarding it with awe and adorning its banks with mounds and silhouetted effigies of animals, humans, and spiritual beings. They respected the “great river” and lived peaceably alongside it. However, when European settlers arrived—and later, when American pioneers put down roots—Native lives and ways of working with the river were upended. White men saw the river as a foe to conquer as they laid claim to land and built America up as an economic power. They engineered levees, jetties, dikes, and dams to support trade and agriculture and grow the economy. In short, they controlled the flow of the Mississippi to accommodate economic activity, but at a terrible cost: the river’s waters turned toxic, and now we’re scrambling to restore its once vibrant ecosystems. In THE GREAT RIVER:The Making and Unmaking of the Mississippi [W. W. Norton & Company], award-winning journalist Boyce Upholt uncovers the Mississippi that persists beneath an infrastructure of concrete and steel. A sweeping history that is also “a deeply felt meditation on the ways people have lived with nature’s changes” (Bathsheba Demuth, author of Floating Coast), this beautifully written book is a startling account of what happens when we try to fight nature instead of acknowledging and embracing its power.

About the Author:

Boyce Upholt is an award-winning journalist whose writing has appeared in the Atlantic, National Geographic, Outside, the New Republic, and Time, among other publications. He lives in New Orleans.

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