The most recommended books about Mississippi

While this is a non-fiction book, with the story that unfolds, you could be forgiven for believing it’s a work of fiction. That a US president, would send tens of thousands of US Army personnel into a state to quell an insurrection in the 20th Century is barely believable, but this is indeed what happened.

The remarkable book sets out the events which surrounded the heated and impassioned debate which evolved around the admission of James Meredith into the University of Mississippi, known as Ole Miss. 

The facts alone make this a compelling read, written in a journalist styling, making the read fast-paced and highly informative.

Ace Atkins is a master of the crime genre. It’s no wonder Robert B. Parker’s estate tapped him to carry on the Spenser series. He’s great at capturing places and the internal monologues of weary men. He’s also able to tell stories just seedy enough to keep readers curious, without making them cringe. The first book in Atkins’ Quinn Colson series is on par with Elmore Leonard’s Raylan Givens books. Quinn seems entirely real, the small town he returns to after a years-long absence feels lived in and believable. And the pacing is masterful. Whereas Perry drags readers along for the action, Atkins makes you feel as though you’re sitting in the backseat, riding down the winding roads of Tibbehah County in northeast Mississippi as Quinn uneasily approaches another backcountry crime scene.    

Men We Reaped blew me away.

Not only does Ward provide an incredibly personal and achingly beautiful glimpse of a culture I was unfamiliar with—a rural, impoverished Black community in the Deep South—but she does so with an innovative structure that simply dazzled me.

One strand of the book opens at the beginning of Ward’s life, while the other strand picks up at the end of her tale, with the most recent of five harrowing deaths due to gun violence that she and her community have endured. Each part of the story then alternately proceeds toward the same point, forwards along her childhood and backwards through each death, until both strands wind up in the middle of the story. It’s brilliantly executed. 

A remarkable book by the classic American writer. It is a novel, yet presents itself as a collection of stories.  Faulkner explores the white history of his fictional Yoknapatawpha County, but also extends himself to explore the Black characters that figure into the history whose true experience he can only have imagined. There are Lucas and Molly Beauchamp of "The Fire and the Hearth," the "Nigger" in "Pantaloon in Black," the part-Indian in "The Old People," Boon Hogganbeck in "The Bear,'" Molly again, and the doomed Samuel Beautchamp in ""Go Down Moses." The book is dedicated to a real person, Mammy, Caroline Barr, of whom Faulkner writes, "Who was born in slavery and who gave to my family a fidelity without stint or calcuation of recompense and to my childhood an immeasurable devotion and love." 

The Will Robie series by David Baldacci is outstanding. The details of the journey Robie takes as an assassin for the United States is intriguing. 

The way Baldacci describes the surroundings gives you the feeling that you are there in the midst of the action right along with Robie. The manner in which Robie carries out his missions will keep you on the edge of your seats wondering if he will make it out alive.

What is so amazing about The Guilty is the realization of you rooting for the assassin to come out on top in this personal battle of confronting his past. It is clear what Robie does for a living—he murders people. Yet we care so much about him, the man, we want him to find a happy place with this family. 

I almost chose a fifth book by an author more readers will likely have heard of (Octavia Butler, Parable of the Sower), but I’m going with a second autobiography, Anne Moody’s, Coming of Age in Mississippi.

Between ages 13 and 16, I read my blue paperback cover of this book more times than I can remember. It’s about Anne Moody’s growing up amid poverty and Jim Crow, beset by sexism and danger from within and outside her community due to her gender and race.

It chronicles her childhood in Mississippi to her evolution into a Civil Rights Activist as a teen and college student. It’s so unforgivingly honest, detailed, and visually rich on the page - it humanizes the history like an Eyes on the Prize documentary but way more personalized.

I think it taught me further about the value of writing very visually,  the power of our individual… show more.

If there is an heir to Harper Lee in the realm of legal thrillers, my vote goes to John Grisham. There’s a basic sense of decency in Grisham’s books that appeals to me. In A Time for Mercy, Grisham’s enduring character Jake Brigance returns to Clanton, Mississippi in a story constructed around a polarizing small-town murder. However, precious little can be categorized along strictly black and white lines in this crime. Grisham understands that we live in a world where the grays of reality are predominant and inherently more interesting. He makes sure we understand the characters, even those we may dislike or disagree with. Grisham doesn’t take the easy way out in A Time for Mercy. The story unfolds to a surprisingly untidy yet satisfying conclusion that leaves the reader with plenty of food for thought.

Fiction as literature of the resistance? Larry Brown’s Joe is a top candidate for what I’d call The Great American Novel. There are many entries, of course: as many stories as there are communities, past, present, and even future. 

What I love about Joe is the simplicity of metaphor. A backwoods ne’er-do-well, Joe Ransom makes his living killing—literally—the great wild biodiversity hardwood powerhouse forests of the Mississippi bottomlands by injecting them with poison so that they die, and the rich forest can be converted to the homogenous, fast-growing, essentially sterile monoculture of southern yellow pine. His way of life—wild, reckless, dangerous—is disappearing as well, and as he kills the thing he loves most, he drinks himself ever-deeper into harm’s way and seeks a violence commensurate with the one he is inflicting upon the forest. Worse yet, he begins to train a young acolyte, an orphan disciple, Gary Jones. The sentences… show more.

The Quiet Game introduces a troubled Penn Cage, who returns with his daughter to his hometown of Natchez, Mississippi when his father lands in trouble. For Penn, family is sacrosanct. Iles uses Natchez brilliantly to support characterization, atmosphere, and plot. Events unfold quickly in a series of twists and turns that thrill the reader and severely test Penn as he struggles to unearth his father’s connection to a horrific Natchez mystery that the town is determined to keep buried. I admire how Penn battles relentlessly on behalf of his father, doggedly pursues a truth that frightens him, and protects his daughter in the face of growing condemnation and danger. He hews to his moral compass even when it would be expedient to abandon it.

As a historian of science, I was fascinated to see how science could be used, abused, and hijacked by regimes of power.

As a Mississippian, I was appalled at how persistent and insidious the problem of racial injustice remains in my state’s legal system. This is an eye-opening book that also reads like a true-crime page-turner.

Gwendolyn Hall’s Africans in Colonial Louisiana is still a foundational text when it comes to studying African people in the colonial lower Mississippi Valley. Her deep knowledge of the archives and skill in bringing the stories of enslaved Africans to live make this a wonderfully informative book. She draws deep connections between the places that Africans left and their forced new homes in Louisiana, while placing a special emphasis on how that culture turned into an African creole culture in the lower Mississippi Valley.

This was a fun and thrilling read about an intricate kidnapping plot. A seemingly perfect crime with the picture-perfect family; ‘Picture Perfect’, is only ever for the picture.

It taught me that even if the odds are stacked against you, you are not captive to your circumstance. This was a psychological and active fight for survival, not only for one’s own survival but for those whom you love.

Courage is contagious.

This is a novel based on Frederick’s own gambling addiction on the Mississippi riverboats. Ray and Jewel Kaiser love to gamble, until a fun night out becomes a compulsion. They find themselves showing up at the Paradise casino all hours of the day and night, becoming intimate with the employees and escalating their bets. After visiting the area, I knew the scenes in the casino ring true and the dialogue is so on point, that you root for Ray and Jewel even though in the back of your mind you know the house always wins. 

Outside cities like that famous Alabama trio, most of the civil rights movement’s actual work took place in rural counties and small towns where combatting segregation could be even more dangerous than in Birmingham. Leading that charge was SNCC, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, and Mississippi was the centerpiece of SNCC’s courageous local organizing. Charles Payne powerfully and poignantly captures the beauty and the perils of that work while also painfully reporting how in subsequent decades memories of that bravery too quickly faded. Clayborne Carson’s In Struggle remains the best organizational history of SNCC, and Francoise N. Hamlin’s Crossroads at Clarksdale is like Payne’s great book a valuable chronicle of Black courage and commitment in the Mississippi Delta.

Ace Atkins played defensive end for Auburn. His picture once graced the cover of Sports Illustrated. His dad coached for the 49ers. In other words, Ace knows football, and that fact is on full display in The Innocents. Although the plot doesn’t center around football, this novel features one of the best depictions of a Southern, sleazeball coach you’ll ever find in fiction. Oh, and it’s a part of Ace’s Quinn Colson series. So if you like it, there’s more where that came from!

This novel was so packed with raw emotion it was overwhelming at times. There were many layers and themes, including gender, racism, and poverty.

I felt a personal connection to the two main characters, drawn in by their loneliness and the undefined and often unrecognized strength they both possessed. The plot was gripping in its intensity, and I found myself cheering for the two girls as they navigated the incredible obstacles in their way.

I usually read for a few minutes before bed, but this book had me staying up late, unwilling (and unable) to put it down. The ending achieved what so many don’t. A clear resolution and a satisfying conclusion to the storm of events we had weathered together. 

Unlike Welty’s works featuring honorable or broadly comic characters, this dense story cycle was never excerpted in anthologies. It’s a trickier cast: consider Jinny Love Stark and Virgie Rainey, who cut through the languor of Depression-era Mississippi with stone-cold intention. Jinny Love plays croquet with her lover to enrage her volatile husband; she encourages her daughter to wear lizards as earrings to offend the propriety of her own controlling mother. Impoverished piano prodigy Virgie flouts her gift merely to watch her teacher go mad. Later, she trims her dead mother’s yard with sewing scissors while neighbors do the real work of laying out the body and receiving mourners. The heat presses forward. What day is it? What hour? This is weird, experimental Welty, and the payoff is sweet.

Mudbound is about post-WWII in the Jim Crow south. It tells the stories of two returning soldiers in a muddy farm setting. I was raised on a dairy farm with plenty of mud, so I easily identified with the setting. The situation of the two men, one White, one Black, and their families' struggles, physically with the constant mud, and emotionally with the politics of both the era and the place, were graphic. It was a book that was difficult to put down and also difficult to read. In ways I was reminded of 12 Years A Slave.

Though Dr. Timothy B. Smith has since made quite the splash in Civil War historiography, this was his first book, covering the Battle of Champion Hill. On May 16, 1863, two armies collided between the Confederate fortress of Vicksburg and the Mississippi state capital at Jackson. The Federals were led by Ulysses S. Grant; the Rebels, John C. Pemberton. Each army numbered bout 30,000 men. While neither the largest or most famous battle of the war, Champion Hill was, nevertheless, a crucial engagement, for it decided the fate of Vicksburg. Frustrated for months by his inability to capture the fortress, Grant at last settled on a daring strategy to take it from the rear. Pemberton marched out to meet him. They met at Champion Hill.

Smith’s narrative embraces the top-down commander’s view of the battle, the soldiers’ view from the ranks, and the impact the fighting had on the local… show more.

Casinos often bring to mind noirish characters set in stories riddled with vice and violence. The Davis Way Crime Capers are riddled with serpentine plots exploding with quirky characters in hilarious situations. Set in a Biloxi, Mississippi, casino with a smart, edgy heroine hired as a security expert, Davis Way is constantly embroiled in saving the casino, its employees, and her small-town friends and family from more disasters than a tornado in a trailer park. Archer’s distinct voice brings humor to the pages of a byzantine mystery that puts her heroine through the wringer. Likable, smart, and sassy, I thoroughly loved Davis Way from Pine Apple, Alabama. The other characters are engaging and the plot is superbly crafted. Double Whammy is the first book in the series and my favorite.