Dispatches from Pluto

By Richard Grant,

Book cover of Dispatches from Pluto: Lost and Found in the Mississippi Delta

Book description

Adventure writer Richard Grant takes on "the most American place on Earth" the enigmatic, beautiful, often derided Mississippi Delta.
Richard Grant and his girlfriend were living in a shoebox apartment in New York City when they decided on a whim to buy an old plantation house in the Mississippi Delta.…

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Why read it?

3 authors picked Dispatches from Pluto as one of their favorite books. Why do they recommend it?

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,…

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.

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Somewhere Else by Merri Melde,

Merri Melde has spent over two cumulative years of her life traveling, answering to an inexplicable need to see the world, to experience different adventures, cultures, people and places.

Taken from her travel journals, Somewhere Else features some of her backpack travels in Nepal, where she trekked the Annapurna Circuit;…

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