I grew up on the Delaware River and took my first canoe trip around 12. Later, in my teens, I worked for a canoe outfitter. During college, I took several longer trips with friends. When a father, I would bring my kids and family along, often with a dog. Later, I would paddle the whole stretch of it, 200 miles from the headwaters to my boyhood home, which I wrote about in my book. To write it, I reread many of these books, including Powell and Graves, who also paddled with his dog. Mine, Sully, joined me on my 9-day trip.
Part scientific expedition, part adventure story, in 1869, the one-armed Civil War veteran descends into the Grand Canyon, the first Euro-American to do so. As the journey progresses down the Colorado and Powell and his men become more fatigued and hungry, his sense of the sublime increases.
Included are amazing wood engravings by artists such as Thomas Moran. Would be good paired with Brave the Wild River, by Melissa Sevigny, about two pioneering women botanists who made the journey in the 1930s to document the canyon’s plant species.
One of the great works of American exploration literature, this account of a scientific expedition forced to survive famine, attacks, mutiny, and some of the most dangerous rapids known to man remains as fresh and exciting today as it was in 1874.
The Exploration of the Colorado River and Its Canyons, recently ranked number four on Adventure magazine’s list of top 100 classics, is legendary pioneer John Wesley Powell’s first-person account of his crew’s unprecedented odyssey along the Green and Colorado Rivers and through the Grand Canyon. A bold foray into the heart of the American West’s final frontier, the…
It is an unforgettable journey of a man (with a dog) paddling down a wild river (the Brazos) about to be flattened into a lake by a dam. The voice is weary and troubled at times but leavened with a curiosity about the natural world and the people he meets. Was he ever bored on the three-week journey?
“You’re no more bored with the sameness of your days and your diet and your task than a chickadee is bored, the passenger on the sunny bow, or a catfish; each day has its fullness, bracketed by sleep.”
In the 1950s, a series of dams was proposed along the Brazos River in north-central Texas. For John Graves, this project meant that if the stream’s regimen was thus changed, the beautiful and sometimes brutal surrounding countryside would also change, as would the lives of the people whose rugged ancestors had eked out an existence there. Graves therefore decided to visit that stretch of the river, which he had known intimately as a youth.
Goodbye to a Riveris his account of that farewell canoe voyage. As he braves rapids and fatigue and the fickle autumn weather, he muses upon old…
McPhee refers to the “gin-clear” water of Alaskan rivers, and his prose is equally lucid. It is also dense with facts, each sentence packed like a canoe or loaded raft. Serialized in the New Yorker in the 1970s, the “The Encircled River” section describes his canoe journey down a 60-mile segment of Salmon River, the most northern river above the Arctic Circle.
With four others who worked for the U.S. government, they studied the river as a national wild river Congress would be voting on to become part of the Kobuk Valley National Monument. The legislation passed under Jimmy Carter on December 2, 1980. Pair with his Survival of a Birch Bark Canoe.
Coming into the Country is an unforgettable account of Alaska and Alaskans. It is a rich tapestry of vivid characters, observed landscapes, and descriptive narrative, in three principal segments that deal, respectively, with a total wilderness, with urban Alaska, and with life in the remoteness of the bush.
Readers of McPhee's earlier books will not be unprepared for his surprising shifts of scene and ordering of events, brilliantly combined into an organic whole. In the course of this volume we are made acquainted with the lore and techniques of placer mining, the habits and legends of the barren-ground grizzly, the…
Traveling down the length of the river, Harris describes his journey less as an external vacation and more as a process of getting to know himself better and better. Harris, from St. Louis, had little to no canoeing experience, but as he gains confidence, he comes to believe he is capable of almost anything.
He also begins to understand what it means to be a Black American on the historic river, but it becomes clear that “people will see I’m Black only moments after they see my canoe is green.” He travels “from where there ain’t no Black folks to where they don’t like us much.” Pair with James, by Percival Everett. Based on Huck Finn, it stays close to the original, yet tells Jim/James's side and takes more seriously his quest for freedom and to reunite with his family.
Since the publication of his first book, Mississippi Solo, Eddy L. Harris has been praised for his travel writing. In this exciting reissue of his classic travelogue, readers will come to treasure the rich insightful prose that is as textured as the Mississippi River itself. They will be taken by the hand by an adventurer whose lifelong dream is to canoe the length of this mighty river, from Minnesota to New Orleans. The trip's dangers were legion for a Black man traveling alone, paddling from "where there ain't no black folks to where they still don't like us much." Barge…
Shortly after graduating college in 2011, Warren and friend Ann recreated the historic wilderness voyage of Eric Sevareid and Walter C. Port, whose 1935 classic, Canoeing with the Cree, chronicled their 2,000-mile trip from Minneapolis to the Hudson Bay.
Using the best equipment they could scrounge, the pair begin their adventure on the heavily flooded Minnesota River. There are plenty of other obstacles, including stretches of dangerous river, run-ins with black bears, and “help” from both generous and suspicious strangers.
During a visit with the Cree people, the adventurers take on a new companion, Myhan, the wolf-dog. In addition to some friendly friction, the book captures how naïve excitement smacks into the realities of such a daunting expedition, which is more than merely camping.
The remarkable eighty-five-day journey of the first two women to canoe the 2,000-mile route from Minneapolis to Hudson Bay
Unrelenting winds, carnivorous polar bears, snake nests, sweltering heat, and constant hunger. Paddling from Minneapolis to Hudson Bay, following the 2,000-mile route made famous by Eric Sevareid in his 1935 classic Canoeing with the Cree, Natalie Warren and Ann Raiho faced unexpected trials, some harrowing, some simply odd. But for the two friends-the first women to make this expedition-there was one timeless challenge: the occasional pitfalls that test character and friendship. Warren's spellbinding account retraces the women's journey from inspiration to…
After a near-fatal stroke and a separation amidst a global pandemic, Rick Van Noy decided to go for a paddle. In my book, he charts the story of discovery and healing that came from this solo canoe journey. Paddling two hundred miles on the Delaware River to his boyhood home in New Jersey, Van Noy contemplates his fate and life, as well as the simple joy of sitting in a small boat floating down a large river with his dog, Sully.
Deftly combining memoir, natural and local history, and engaging reportage of his encounters with other paddlers and river enthusiasts, including members of the Lenape Nation of Pennsylvania, Van Noy reveals the Delaware's deep and shifting layers of environmental, historical, cultural, and personal significance.
I read and write to better understand people. Why do we do what we do, feel what we feel, hide what we hide? Any book that illuminates these questions and their answers draws me in. Reading and writing are ways that I can attempt to walk in someone else’s shoes and see the world through their eyes, expanding my own understanding of the world. Perhaps the books on this list will offer you the same opportunity.
Ava Winston likes her life of routine in Lexington, Kentucky. Then a tornado blows it away. Ava is safe in the basement, but when she emerges, only one corner of her home stands. Rather than crumbling under the loss, she feels a load lifted. Maybe something beyond the familiar is calling to her. Ava seizes the opportunity to find the owner of a suitcase that landed on her lawn during the storm. Meanwhile, Juniper urges her to rebuild, Ava’s employer doesn’t want her to quit, and her ex-husband invites her back into his life. Ava must be courageous if she’s…
"A loving coming-of-age story for women in mid-life. Brava!" -Adriana Trigiani, Author of The Good Left Undone
". . . captures the true meaning of resilience-something so many women strive to know in the depths of their inner-self." -Sister Robbie Pentecost, OSF former Executive Director of the New Opportunity School for Women
Ava Winston likes her life of routine in Lexington, Kentucky. Each day, she goes to the place she's worked for twenty years, then returns home. On Sundays, she has dinner with her daughter, Juniper. It's a little boring, but as Ava nears fifty-five, she deserves a bit of…
