Dispatches from Pluto

Richard Grant a British journalist and adventure writer traveled the world before moving from New York City with his Brookland girlfriend to transform a dilapidated antebellum mansion in Mississippi into a new home and a new life.

In the process he discovers the real Mississippi—good and bad—as “the most American place on earth.” This book makes the reader laugh, cry, but most important think deeply about jazz, sex, politics, food, America’s class system, racism, democracy, and what it means to be American which is in constant change.

Grant’s writing is addictive and an elixir—you can’t put it down. 

English journalist Richard Grant, known for adventure travelogues into Mexican deserts and African rivers, enters one of the most myth-laden spots in the U.S. – the Mississippi Delta. With his girlfriend, Grant moves into an old plantation house outside the village of Pluto, Miss. and begins a remarkable exploration of southern culture, with deep, honest, and revealing conversations and interactions about race. Three hundred years after the arrival of African-Caribbean slaves, Grant finds that racial bias remains deeply rooted in the Delta soil, but remarkably, produces not only cotton but generosity, grace, kindness, and tolerance. This author’s experience, like mine,… show more.

This is a fantastic dive into a tangle of interrelated subcultures in a part of America so foreign to me that I felt like I was reading about another country. Richard Grant unlocks the secret of how to talk about deep-seated patterns of social injustice in a way that I found to be, not just educational, but a riveting read. This book taught me that sometimes the best way to spread awareness is by getting off of one’s soapbox, and simply allowing the facts – funny, sad, and maddening – to speak for themselves.