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A familiar name piques Willie Black's interest on a slow news day: Scuffletown Park. He and the first of his four wives lived next to the pocket park when they were young and still on speaking terms. Now, Scuffletown is the site of a crime scene, one that doesn't fit the usual modus operandi for Richmond. For one thing, there's plenty of blood but no body. Also, it seems that a knife was involved, a rarity Willie's gun-happy city. And, Scuffletown is in the heart of the Fan, where violence is a blessedly rare occurrence. Before long there is a body. There also is a neighbor who caught the deed on his iPhone camera. When his old friend and current police flack Peachy Love gives Willie a sneak peek at the remarkably clear photograph, he starts wishing he'd never seen Scuffletown Park again. How is it possible that Abe Custalow is standing over what appears to be a very dead body? Abe has been sharing Willie Black's condo since Willie found his childhood pal living homeless in Monroe Park. Even now, with Willie married to the lovely Cindy Peroni Black, Abe remains ensconced there. OK, he did kill a guy once, but the guy deserved killing, and Abe's been Mr. Clean ever since. With his condo-mate in jail, Willie does what a good reporter does best: He starts digging, with no assistance from Custalow, who insists that Willie "just leave it alone." That would go against every instinct in Willie Black's nosy-ass body, but when he finally gets within hailing distance of the truth, he understands why Abe wanted him to back off. Before Scuffletown reaches its conclusion, Willie knows he will have to risk his oldest friendship in order to save his oldest friend from a life behind bars.
Educational and entertaining, this book contains snippets of life that reflect hard work and humor, love of nature, and the role of friends and family in the shaping of a life. While describing the hardships of life at an earlier period in our history, to which many older adults can relate, the book is all up-to-date in its moments dedicated to the stories of great outdoors and its wildlife -- moments of innocence and awakening, that reflect how perennial and endurable childhood times really are. Some of the tales are sad, some are hilarious, some refer to potentially dangerous adventures, but all carry that charming trait of simplicity with which the writer manages to hold our attention throughout.
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.
Gerald Sider explores the dynamics of the struggle for racial and ethnic identities in the southern United States, focusing on the Lumbee Indians of North Carolina. He provides a history of American Indian concepts and visions of history and shows how differing interpretations of history cause traditionally oppressed peoples to continue their struggle.