Life on the Mississippi: An Epic American Adventure

Books

The eagerly awaited return of master American storyteller Rinker Buck, whose last book The Oregon Trail was a triumphant #1 New York Times bestseller. Life on the Mississippi is another epic, enchanting blend of history and adventure. Buck builds an authentic wooden flatboat from the early 1800s and pilots it down the Mississippi River, illuminating the forgotten past of the river and the grand "flatboat era" that dramatically extended the country in the decades before Western expansion. In 2015, readers, critics, and booksellers across 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 and propelled his book, The Oregon Trail, to ten weeks on the New York Times hardcover bestseller list. The Oregon Trail was hailed as a "real nonfiction thriller" (The New York Review of Books), a "quintessential American story" (The Christian Science Monitor) that "so ensnares the emotions it becomes a tear-jerker ...