★ 04/22/2024

Journalist Upholt debuts with a majestic history of the Mississippi River, beginning with how a subterranean rift and the movement of glaciers created and shaped the waterway over tens of millions of years. Exploring Native Americans’ historical relationship to the Mississippi, Upholt notes that Southeastern tribes farmed fish in the river and maintained a culture of “reciprocal obligation” that mandated they share any surplus with neighboring villages. This philosophy was challenged by European colonizers who sought to commodify the natural world and tame the river, building levees and dams to make it more reliable for commercial transport and create fertile farmlands in the floodplains. These efforts had disastrous consequences, Upholt argues, noting that the depletion of marshlands that once acted as buffers against rising waters has worsened storm-related flooding and that the erection of dams sometimes submerged Native American farmlands and burial mounds. The foregrounding of Native American history highlights alternative ways of relating to nature besides domination, and Upholt’s crystalline prose evokes the grandeur of his subject (“On some mornings, the water lifts into mist so thick you realize there is no end to the air and no beginning to the water, so your boat floats upon and within the river at once”). It’s an exceptional natural history that never loses sight of the human players involved. (June)

"With masterful research and reporting, Boyce Upholt makes a compelling case that, despite our centuries-long efforts to control its unpredictable pulses with concrete, steel, and earthen berms, the Mississippi River in many ways remains wild as ever. And he shows us why that is good."

"With tributaries of history, geography, engineering, and environmental science, Boyce Upholt’s The Great River brings clarity and cohesion to a topic that intermixes complex stories across, quite literally, a million square miles. Using elements of travelogue and including fine maps, this compelling book takes readers through the making and unmaking of the Mississippi River, and leaves them with a hunch that, in the end, the river will remake itself."

"From mound-builders to levee-makers, Boyce Upholt gives us a Mississippi both wild and engineered, life-giving and furious—a river as full of contradictions as the country that has tried and failed to tame it. Impossible to stop reading, The Great River is a deeply felt meditation on the ways people have lived with nature's changes, and how we might live differently in the future."

"The Great River is easily one of the best books ever written about the Mississippi. It brings depth of scholarship to everything from geology to history to current politics, all of it elegantly written."

"An epic alluvial chronicle. On his travels through the geological, hydrological, archeological, and historical records, Boyce Upholt unearths the stories and meanings, injustices and mysteries and fugitive beauties to be found among the relict meanders and chemical refineries of the flood plains. As the best environmental journalism does, by bringing the past to bear upon the present, The Great River complicates our understanding of both."

"Few books have ever chronicled a landform as beautifully as The Great River, a thorough and wise meditation on the United States’s mightiest watershed. Like a savvy riverboat captain, Boyce Upholt expertly pilots his narrative across shoals of history and through oxbows of science; like the Mississippi itself, his book braids and bends, carrying its readers from deep time to the Anthropocene on a swift current of reportage."

2024-03-20
A lively survey of Old Man River, born of extensive research and travel.

The Mississippi River, writes New Orleans–based journalist Upholt, is contested on many fronts. One is why the river bears the name of a continent-wide system when the Missouri is almost twice as long and the Ohio contributes more water. Another is whether to allow the river anything of its wild self. “The only longer human-made landform on the planet is China’s Great Wall,” writes the author about the river-taming levee that runs to “the headwaters of the Atchafalaya.” Levees keep the floodplain from doing its work, and Upholt shows how before the engineers got to it, the floodplain would be frequently submerged as the river flowed and overflowed, yielding the richest of soil. Many other things have changed, including invasive species displacing river natives such as the buffalo fish. Upholt builds a natural and human history along the template established by the Rivers of America series of yore, a blend of anecdote and observation. His account is more politically charged than all that, though, with an environmental twist that soon turns to economics. In the economy of enslavement, for instance, riverine malaria felled captive workers, and only the richest of plantation owners, “able to afford the workforce needed to make this landscape work,” could cultivate the river’s fertile bottomlands. Naturally, it’s just that class of wealthy owner that the levee system protects. Pulling back those levees, Upholt writes, could refresh the bottomlands while also enriching the river. In one example, where the river widens along its plain, “Corps of Engineers fish surveys found a record-breaking number of juvenile sturgeon.” It would cost billions to do so, but for any Mississippi River aficionado—and clearly, Upholt is one—it would be worth every cent.

A fluent addition to the literature of America’s rivers.