{"id":121838,"date":"2022-08-11T07:17:00","date_gmt":"2022-08-11T12:17:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.thelocalvoice.net\/oxford\/?p=121838"},"modified":"2022-08-10T22:27:54","modified_gmt":"2022-08-11T03:27:54","slug":"life-on-the-mississippi-author-rinker-buck-to-visit-off-square-books-thursday-august-18-2022","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.thelocalvoice.net\/oxford\/life-on-the-mississippi-author-rinker-buck-to-visit-off-square-books-thursday-august-18-2022\/","title":{"rendered":"“Life on the Mississippi” Author Rinker Buck to Visit Off Square Books Thursday, August 18, 2022"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Author Rinker Buck<\/strong> is back with a new American expedition: Life on the Mississippi: An Epic American Adventure<\/em><\/strong> on Thursday, August 18 at 6 pm<\/strong>. Rinker will be in conversation with Clarksdale<\/strong>, Mississippi<\/strong>, river guide John Ruskey<\/strong>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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<\/em>, to ten weeks on the New York Times<\/em> 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<\/strong> to New Orleans<\/strong>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

A modern-day Huck Finn, Buck casts off down the river on the flatboat Patience<\/em> 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

As a historian, Buck resurrects the era\u2019s adventurous spirit, but he also challenges familiar myths about American<\/strong> expansion, confronting the bloody truth behind settlers\u2019 push for land and wealth. The Indian Removal Act<\/strong> of 1830 forced more than 125,000 members of the Cherokee<\/strong>, Choctaw<\/strong>, and several other tribes to travel the Mississippi <\/strong>on a brutal journey en route to the barrens of Oklahoma<\/strong>. Simultaneously, almost a million enslaved African Americans<\/strong> were carried in flatboats and marched by foot 1,000 miles over the Appalachians <\/strong>to the cotton and cane fields of Arkansas<\/strong>, Mississippi, and Louisiana<\/strong>, birthing the term \u201csold down the river.\u201d Weaving together a tapestry of first-person histories, Buck portrays this watershed era of American expansion as it was really lived.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

With a rare narrative power that blends stirring adventure with absorbing untold history, Life on the Mississippi <\/em>is a mus\u00adcular and majestic feat of storytelling from a writer who may be the closest that we have today to Mark Twain.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Author Rinker Buck is back with a new American expedition: Life on the Mississippi: An Epic American Adventure<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":238,"featured_media":121840,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2239],"tags":[22114,22111,5,13759,4,22112,602],"class_list":["post-121838","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-local-literary-events","tag-john-ruskey","tag-life-on-the-mississippi","tag-mississippi","tag-off-square-books-2","tag-oxford","tag-rinker-buck","tag-square-books"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.thelocalvoice.net\/oxford\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/08\/Rinker_Buck__c__Dan_Corjulo-750.jpg?fit=750%2C500&ssl=1","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thelocalvoice.net\/oxford\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/121838","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thelocalvoice.net\/oxford\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thelocalvoice.net\/oxford\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thelocalvoice.net\/oxford\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/238"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thelocalvoice.net\/oxford\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=121838"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.thelocalvoice.net\/oxford\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/121838\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thelocalvoice.net\/oxford\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/121840"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thelocalvoice.net\/oxford\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=121838"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thelocalvoice.net\/oxford\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=121838"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thelocalvoice.net\/oxford\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=121838"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}