Here are 100 books that Song of the Paddle fans have personally recommended if you like
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As a longtime outdoors editor of a Mississippi newspaper, I actually got paid to paddle local rivers. Over the decades, I expanded my territory to adjacent states, the South, the continent, and other countries. I parlayed my experiences into several books on rivers. As a paddler and writer, I naturally love to read about adventures on the water–not only classics like Mark Twain's Life on the Mississippi River and Paul Theroux's Happy Isles of Oceania but also the many less-known but highly praiseworthy books like those listed here.
Scott and I started canoeing together back in the 1980s. Then he ventured into sea kayaking. After discovering how much he loved the vessel and how seaworthy it was, Scott–young and single at the time–decided to kayak across the Caribbean. I accompanied him on a shakedown cruise, but being happily married and gainfully employed, I let him go for the rest alone.
The result, recorded in this book, is a mind-boggling adventure: rammed by sharks, stormbound, stung by Portuguese man-o-war, camping on uninhabited islands, spearfishing, and more. He hitched rides on sailboats for the dangerously long passages but otherwise took his time exploring islands, concluding at a place aptly called Bitter End.
Tourists visit popular islands of the Caribbean by the planeload. What they don't see from their resort hotels are the hundreds of out-of-the-way, uninhabited islands sprinkled along the West Indies from Florida to South America. This alluring archipelago, strung with beaches accessible only by boat but spaced temptingly close together, led Mississippi adventurer Scott B. Williams to embark upon an open-ended quest to see how far south he could go in a seventeen-foot sea kayak. No one was willing to accompany him. He spent months working his way down the west coast of Florida, through the Bahamas, and on to…
As a longtime outdoors editor of a Mississippi newspaper, I actually got paid to paddle local rivers. Over the decades, I expanded my territory to adjacent states, the South, the continent, and other countries. I parlayed my experiences into several books on rivers. As a paddler and writer, I naturally love to read about adventures on the water–not only classics like Mark Twain's Life on the Mississippi River and Paul Theroux's Happy Isles of Oceania but also the many less-known but highly praiseworthy books like those listed here.
Johnny Molloy is surely one of the most prolific outdoor authors ever, with 85 books to his credit so far. Most of those are regional guidebooks, but he has also written a few first-person narratives of his journeys.
This one describes his canoe and kayak trip down the Suwannee River and along Florida's southwest coast to the Everglades. His down-to-earth style really puts you there.
I met Johnny when he was writing a guidebook to Mississippi's hiking trails. After a riverbank lunch of sardines, crackers, and sweet tea, we fired up cigars and swapped yarns. He was just like he sounds in his books–humble and down-to-earth.
Johnny Molloy, author of several best-selling outdoor guides to Florida, is always game for adventure. In his latest, he travels the Sunshine State from north to south along some of its most famous rivers, swamps, salt marshes, and open waters in search of Florida's disappearing history. This personal travelogue of his two-month expedition begins in a canoe at the Okefenokee Swamp, headwaters of Florida's best-known river. Paddling the dark Suwannee, Molloy curves through the scenic and sometimes wild Big Shoals, past sparkling clear springs - Troy and Turtle and Rock Bluff and more - to the Gulf of Mexico, where…
As a longtime outdoors editor of a Mississippi newspaper, I actually got paid to paddle local rivers. Over the decades, I expanded my territory to adjacent states, the South, the continent, and other countries. I parlayed my experiences into several books on rivers. As a paddler and writer, I naturally love to read about adventures on the water–not only classics like Mark Twain's Life on the Mississippi River and Paul Theroux's Happy Isles of Oceania but also the many less-known but highly praiseworthy books like those listed here.
I could have selected any of Don Jackson's four books for this list. Each is a collection of essays about his outdoor adventures spanning locations from Arkansas to Alaska to Borneo. Many, if not most, of the places he writes about involve rivers, which is unsurprising since he's a retired fisheries professor.
I met Don when I was researching a river for a newspaper article. We hit it off and made several canoe trips together. While his books reveal his considerable knowledge of biology, hunting, and fishing, what really sets them apart is a strong sense of the spiritual, as the subtitle of this book indicates.
In Deeper Currents, Donald C. Jackson guides us on a journey into the cathedrals of wild and lonely places, those sacred spaces where hunters and fishers connect with the rhythms of the earth and the spirit that resonates within us. Jackson explores hunting and fishing as frameworks - sacraments - for discovering, engaging, and finding meaning. He invites readers to consider connections with wilder realms of being.
Hunting squirrels on an autumn morning, probing the woods, rifle in hand, Jackson reveals an attention to nature too often neglected. Following a bird dog into the damp and mysterious places where woodcock…
As a longtime outdoors editor of a Mississippi newspaper, I actually got paid to paddle local rivers. Over the decades, I expanded my territory to adjacent states, the South, the continent, and other countries. I parlayed my experiences into several books on rivers. As a paddler and writer, I naturally love to read about adventures on the water–not only classics like Mark Twain's Life on the Mississippi River and Paul Theroux's Happy Isles of Oceania but also the many less-known but highly praiseworthy books like those listed here.
I grew up near the Mississippi River, and my father and older brother worked on it for many years, so I was thrilled to run across this in-depth look at the world they inhabited. As the wife of a riverboat pilot, Melody Golding had unparalleled access to the inner workings of river life.
Over the course of a decade, she interviewed more than 100 men and women and let them tell their own stories. An acclaimed photographer, she illustrated this project with fabulous color photos. Thanks to her, I got to ride along the vessels that ply the Mississippi and other waterways, just like my dad and brother once did.
Life Between the Levees is a chronicle of first-person reflections and folklore from pilots who have dedicated their lives to the river. The stories are as diverse as the storytellers themselves, and the volume is full of drama, suspense, and a way of life a "landlubber" could never imagine. Although waterways and ports in the Mississippi corridor move billions of dollars of products throughout the US and foreign markets, in today's world those who live and work on land have little knowledge of the river and the people who work there.
In ten years of interviewing, Melody Golding collected over…
My parents joined an evangelical cult when I was ten years old, and I was taught to fear everything, to truly believe I was an evil child, and that God wanted rule-following, humble servants who cowered before him. When I tried to rebel, I was punished and sent away to a cult camp in Colorado where a creepy pastor exhorted us daily. I finally escaped the cult for good when I was 17, but it took a long, long time to recover. Now, along with writing dark novels, I teach wilderness survival and the neuroscience of survival, and I try to apply my knowledge and skills when writing my characters in theAmerican Afterlife series.
Any Peter Heller novel will work here—The Dog Stars, The Painter, etc.—butThe River is really interesting for a few reasons: Heller pushes his characters into the unknown on a river that serves both as a literal symbol and a propulsive, metaphorical symbol. There’s no way to backtrack on a river, so his two friends can’t go backwards. Then we add in the imminent danger of a forest fire and the creepy people also on the river with them, and the whole entire mix is scary!
ONE OF THE OBSERVER THRILLERS OF THE YEAR: 'GLORIOUS PROSE AND RAZOR-SHARP TENSION'
'LYRICAL AND ACTION-PACKED' Guardian 'I COULDN'T TURN THE PAGES FAST ENOUGH' Clare Mackintosh 'IMPOSSIBLE TO PUT DOWN, OR FORGET' Sunday Mirror 'GLORIOUS DRAMA AND LYRICAL FLAIR Denise Mina, New York Times
Two friends Wynn and Jack have been best friends since their first day of college, brought together by their shared love the great outdoors.
The adventure of a lifetime When they decide to canoe down the Maskwa River in northern Canada, they anticipate the ultimate wilderness experience: no phones, no fellow travellers, no way of going…
I have always been fascinated with stories about women who step outside the norm and accomplish their goals. Books that tell of girls who are shy or insecure, but find inner strength in the face of adversity, inspire me. My mother wasn’t afraid to guide me toward these stories when I was young, and I gave books with this theme to my daughters as well. It doesn’t matter where you start from, it only matters where you think you can go, and I love books that share this idea; especially stories of women who do amazing and unexpected things.
This book is about sixteen-year-old Katherine Mary O’Fallon, who early in the twentieth century, moves to Canada to recover from an extended illness. She falls in love with a six-foot-tall sergeant in the Canadian Mounted Police, Mike Flanigan—a man of courage, kindness, and humor. They marry, and overnight the couple travels for days by dog sled, as Mike is to become a combination of police, doctor, and mayor of a small community in the harsh, unforgiving Canadian Northern Territory.
This story shows life in the untamed Northern Territory through the eyes of Kathy. Even though she is afraid and completely oblivious to the adventures before her, she faces her new life head-on. Through the kindness and calm positivity of her husband, Kathy heals from her illness, learns self-reliance, and finds an inner strength she didn’t know she possessed. The love story is sweet and the descriptions of life…
A classic and wholesome romantic tale that has enchanted millions of readers worldwide, Mrs. Mike brings the fierce, stunning landscape of the Great North to life—and masterfully evokes the tender, touching moments that bring a man and a woman together forever.
Recently arrived in Calgary, Alberta after a long, hard journey from Boston, sixteen-year-old Katherine Mary O’Fallon never imagined that she could lose her heart so easily—or so completely. Standing over six feet tall, with “eyes so blue you could swim in them,” Mike Flannigan is a well-respected sergeant in the Canadian Mounted Police—and a man of great courage, kindness,…
I am a Full Professor of Leadership within the Faculty of Education, University of Ottawa, Canada. I am the recipient of the 2020 Research Excellence Award. My research, funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC) and the Ontario Ministry of Education, Canada, is international in scope. I am also the founder of the Equitable Leadership Network at the University of Ottawa.
Fung writes a powerful story about survival, her captivity, and her indomitable spirit under the most perilous of circumstances that she lived through in Kabul, Afghanistan after being grabbed by the Taliban. As the Canadian reporter describes her bone-chilling account of the horrific twenty-eight days, I am left in awe of her strength and courage.
In October 2008, Mellissa Fung, a reporter for CBC’s The National, was leaving a refugee camp outside of Kabul when she was kidnapped by armed men. She was forced to hike for several hours through the mountains until they reached a village; there, the kidnappers pushed her towards a hole in the ground. “No,” she said. “I am not going down there.”
For more than a month, Fung lived in that hole, which was barely tall enough to stand up in, nursing her injuries, praying and writing in a notebook. Under an Afghan Sky is the gripping tale of Fung’s…
I have always loved history and art. Combining the two makes perfect sense and provides the inspiration to keep writing. I can spend hours in a museum, just soaking up the magic in Impressionist paintings. I never get tired of researching the artists or their paintings, and I relish the unexpected discoveries.
I love the way there is a mystery within a mystery. A group of actors is staging a play for the benefit of the passengers on a transcontinental train trip across Canada. The protagonist, who is undercover and posing as a waiter, befriends the lead actor and takes a page out of Hamlet, using the play to pressure the villain into making a mistake and incriminating himself. Accurate details about working as a waiter lend a sense of ‘David versus Goliath’ to the storyline.
To the Jockey Club, the racing world would be a better place without Julius Apollo Filmer. An expert in corruption with a devastating line in witness intimidation - and proving to be a slippery character to put behind bars.
Baffled, they call in undercover security agent Tor Kelsey to keep an unflinching eye on Filmer and his associates. A mission that takes him from the finest of English racecourses to the wild Canadian interior - on a luxury transcontinental train journey to end them all.
On board, a troupe of actors are playing out a murder mystery for…
I was born and raised as both an anglophone Canadian and a diaspora Jew. After living in Montreal, Jerusalem, and New York for a total of about 15 years, I returned to my hometown of Toronto and took up the position of the J. Richard Shiff Chair for the Study of Canadian Jewry at York University, where I work as a professor of history. I teach undergraduate students, graduate students, fellow academics, community leaders, and the wide public about all sorts of dimensions of this very religiously diverse, culturally diverse, socio-economically diverse, and politically diverse community of 400,000+ souls, with its 260+-year-old history.
I love this book’s choc-a-block presentation of actual archival fragments from Jewish life in the British colonies that would eventually become Canada.
I also like that the book’s husband-wife, antiquarian, author team aimed to fuse together two objectives in one book: on the one hand, to paint a relatable picture of what Jewish life looked like during this period when Upper Canada was still being formed, and on the other hand, to account for the step-by-step process of Jews gaining civil rights in the new world.
When I teach Canadian Jewish history, I not only read this book with my students but also bring them into the archives that contain Godfrey’s trove of archival fragments of early Jewish Canadiana, which they collected before and while writing the book.
Mapping the history of Canadian Jews from the arrival of the first settlers before 1750 through to the 1860s, Search Out the Land introduces a new set of colourful players on Canada's stage. Ezekiel Solomons, John Franks, Jacob Franks, Chapman Abraham, Rachel Myers, Moses David, Samuel Hart, Elizabeth Lyons, and a host of others now take their appropriate place in Canadian history. Focusing on the significant role played by Jews in British North America in the fight for civil and political rights, the authors compare the development of Canadians' rights with that in other British jurisdictions of the time and…
I first became interested in the history of the British Empire as an undergraduate. Understanding this history helped me relate my parents’ experiences growing up in a postcolonial nation with the history of the United States, where I grew up. As an academic historian, my research and teaching emphasize connections—between disparate places, between the past and present, and between our personal experiences and those of people born in distant times and places. My first children’s book allowed me to translate my scholarly work for a young audience. I hope this list of books that inspire my approach to history encourages your own investigations of imperialism and its pasts!
George Manuel was once asked by a white coworker, “Does Indians have feelings?” Refusing dehumanization, Manuel reveals the ongoing colonial relations between First Nations and the Canadian settler state. He charts his political journey from Secwepemcúl̓ecw to the National Indian Brotherhood to the World Council of Indigenous Peoples.
Manuel argues that the victories of the anti-colonial independence movements of the twentieth century did not end colonial domination of Indigenous Peoples—what he calls the Fourth World. The Fourth World is not a destination but the right to travel on your own road in your own way.
With a new insightful introduction, foreword, and afterword, the book's latest edition shows how Manuel’s analysis of colonialism and vision for solidarity continue to be relevant to contemporary struggles for decolonization.
A foundational work of radical anticolonialism, back in print
Originally published in 1974, The Fourth World is a critical work of Indigenous political activism that has long been out of print. George Manuel, a leader in the North American Indian movement at that time, with coauthor journalist Michael Posluns, presents a rich historical document that traces the struggle for Indigenous survival as a nation, a culture, and a reality. The authors shed light on alternatives for coexistence that would take place in the Fourth World-an alternative to the new world, the old world, and the Third World. Manuel was the…
