10 books like Life on the Mississippi

Although times have certainly changed since Anne Morrow Lindbergh wrote Gift from the Sea in 1955, the struggle to define ourselves and our relationships has not. Secluding herself on an almost deserted island, Lindbergh uses a variety of distinctive beach shells as writing prompts to philosophically examine the way we live and relate to each other.

The simplicity of being isolated in a rustic cottage beside a beautiful beach with only seagulls as companions allows Lindbergh the freedom to explore and question the choices we make. In today’s noisy, frenetic world, who among us wouldn’t like to escape to an island to contemplate our life’s trajectory? A soft breeze, the rhythmic music of the waves, the sun on our backs, and time to think. Sign me up.

Bewitched by the fragrant fells, humble farms, and verdant scenery of Yorkshire, England, James Herriot, a 23-year-old veterinarian, found his love of place and stayed there till the end of his life. Set in the 1930s, All Creatures Great and Small documents not only the charming vistas of Herriot’s veterinary world, but also the beguiling animals and characters who gave voice to this enchanting landscape.

As a young teacher back in the 1970s, I came across his memoir and was immediately smitten even before it became a wildly popular series. Although I did not know it at the time, I think Herriot’s approach to finding a story in the everydayness of life subconsciously influenced my own writing of personal essays and memoir. To him, I tip my pen.

I have never been to Africa and probably will not get there, but because of Karen Blixen’s haunting memoir, Out of Africa, I feel I have seen its beauty and allure. Living on and managing her coffee plantation near the Ngong Hills of British East Africa (now Kenya) from 1913-1931, Blixen’s love of place is clearly evident in her mesmerizing descriptions of her home, the people who lived beside her, and the African wilderness that surrounded it all. 

With lyrical language, Blixen brings to life the gentle elephants traipsing across the plains, the roar of the lions, the herd of running zebras, but more importantly, the captivating images of an environment that has long since disappeared for all. In my dreams, I am there.

There is no finer memoir celebrating a love of place than Truman Capote’s A Christmas Memory. His opening lines take you right into the heart of the kitchen in a rural Alabama home where he lived as a young boy with an elderly distant cousin in the late 1920s. Those few cherished years would influence his writing and life for as long as he lived.

Writing in concise, elegant language, Capote centers his brief memoir around one Thanksgiving and Christmas when he was seven and his beloved cousin, Miss Souk Faulk, was in her late sixties. Perhaps it is because I have hosted Thanksgiving for my family for years, that I so appreciate Capote’s ability to capture, with humor and poignancy, the power of traditions with those you love.

“The cruise of a ship is a biography,” wrote Raphael Semmes about his ocean-straddling tall ship, CSS Alabama. “The ship becomes a personification. She not only, ‘walks the waters like a thing of life,’ but she speaks in moving accents to those capable of interpreting her.” In this excellent biography of Carondelet’s career, a squat, ugly, ironclad gunboat also becomes a major character along with the men who designed and built the revolutionary vessel, stoked her engines, and fired her big guns. In tactics and technology, riverine warfare was invented from scratch and indispensable to victory. This work (and Smith’s entire series on brown water war vessels) provides fresh and enlightening perspectives on every major battle down the Mississippi from Forts Henry and Donelson through Vicksburg to Red River.

Originally published in 1932, this remains one of the most accessible and thought-provoking books ever written about the American West. Webb’s work rises to the level of literature, especially when describing early encounters by white Americans with the landscape and native people they met west of the 98th meridian. Few writers have captured so vividly the expansion of America from the humid and forested east to the arid west of the Great Plains. Some of Webb’s conclusions may feel a little dated, but this remains a very compelling and rewarding book.

When Lauren Cook and I published They Fought Like Demons, we knew that our book, although groundbreaking, was only the tip of the iceberg in the story of women soldiers in the Civil War, and we always hoped that another scholar would pick up the torch and move the story forward.  Shelby Harriel has done just that.  Behind the Rifle is a meticulously researched and ably written account of the distaff soldiers who hailed from Mississippi, or found themselves there.  Citing previously unknown sources along with revealing newly-located photographs, Harriel’s contribution to the history of women soldiers is remarkable.

The war’s greatest military historian takes on its greatest military figure in Bruce Catton’s spirited two-volume classic: Grant Moves South and Grant Takes Command. Written decades ago, these paired volumes remain the finest historical account of Grant’s triumphant Civil War career. In the opening volume, we meet the recently minted brigadier in September 1861 as he prepares to join his army at desolate Cairo, Illinois, having just recovered from a succession of crushing personal failures. In the concluding volume, we leave him at Petersburg Virginia in April 1865, after he demolishes R. E. Lee’s army in the climactic battle of the war. Wannabe revisionists think Catton is outdated. Don’t believe them.

Sometimes it takes an outsider to see deeper into a country. Raban was a respected English novelist and critic when he moved to the USA and settled there – something I would later do myself. He proceeded to produce a series of brilliantly vivid travel books about his new homeland, of which this was the first. Avoiding the inevitable road trip (though he did those later), he takes a motorboat for a solo journey down the Mississippi River. Long periods alone allow him the chance to reflect on the river, nature, and the USA, but he also has lively encounters with the people who live by the river, revealing their passions and their pains.

Melville’s first novel calls “the white civilized man” “the most ferocious animal on the face of the earth.” Billy Budd, his final work, predicts the triumph of militarism and war. My first public speech against the Vietnam War began with a quote from The Confidence-Man (1857). I’ve read it many times and published an annotated edition, so I can guarantee you that every time you read this book you will get more out of it, just as I do. The steamboat Fidele sails down the Mississippi. A Christ-like passenger disappears. A negro cripple lists passengers we should look for. Avatars of the confidence man bamboozle representative Americans. After the sun sets, slave states are on both sides of the southward voyage, a mysterious “Cosmopolitan” appears, darkness envelopes the boat, and its destination seems to be the apocalypse.  What is this book about? America. Our species. Where we are headed.