Download or read book The End of the River written by Simon Winchester and published by Scribd, Inc.. This book was released on 2020-04-14 with total page 57 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: When it comes to climate-change-inspired threats, it is rising sea levels we hear most about. But if the oceans are, as Herman Melville put it, “the tide-beating heart of the earth,” rivers are its circulatory system. In the United States, there is no river more storied, symbolic, and vital than the Mississippi, and none, to use Mark Twain’s word, more lawless. The struggle to control it has been going on nearly as long as there has been human civilization on its banks, and the attendant drama and dangers have been memorialized by many writers, among them Twain and, in his seminal 1987 New Yorker account, John McPhee. Now Simon Winchester, the consummate, critically acclaimed storyteller and bestselling author of Atlantic and The Professor and the Madman, turns his eye to what could well be the height of the battle, one increasingly doomed by man’s interference. The most fateful instance of this interference was accomplished by an inventor and steamboat captain, Henry Miller Shreve, in the nineteenth century. In vivid detail, Winchester re-creates the smashing and digging and the great man- and steam power that Shreve wielded to clear the river of snags and logjams and, in order to shorten the passage to New Orleans, carve an entirely new channel for it. What no one foresaw was that his celebrated shortcut, Shreve’s Cut, would form a sloping chute to an adjacent river, the Atchafalaya, and, aided by gravity and shifting weather patterns, increasingly tempt the waters of the Mississippi in its direction. Resisting this trend with ever more ingenious methods (and ever more expense) began just after, first with a system of levees, then with added spillways, and, finally, with the conception and construction of a floodgate system, the Old River Control Structure, still in place today. And the stakes are high: If—many say when—the Atchafalaya captures the Mississippi’s stream, it will be the end of life as it’s currently known in the American South. The great cities of Louisiana—New Orleans and Baton Rouge—would be rendered fetid swamps; entire sections of the American infrastructure, from pipelines to electricity and water supply, would collapse. Homes would be displaced and livelihoods, if not lives, would be lost. Deftly combining the hydrological and the historical, Winchester tours the challenges that upped the ante on the Mississippi River Commission’s duty to protect the watershed and its inhabitants: the upheavals that came in the form of the Great Flood of 1927, one of the most destructive natural disasters of all time, displacing more people than almost any event in American history, and the record-breaking inundations of 1937 and 1973. He pays tribute to the Army Corps of Engineers, for their Herculean efforts to keep the river on its current track, and to one civilian, Albert Einstein’s son Hans Albert Einstein, a hydraulic engineer and one of the main architects of the mighty control structure that continues to divide the Mississippi from the Atchafalaya. But how long can it hold in a time when extremes of weather are the norm, when storms come faster and more furiously, sending sediment-loaded water pounding against the floodgates—events that not only pit man against nature but, given that we cannot always agree which causes and correctives to pursue, man against man? In this elegant synthesis of past and present, the exigencies of the natural world and the human, Winchester offers an engrossing cautionary tale that readers cannot afford to ignore. It is a call to arms that asks whether accepting defeat—letting nature take its course—may be the only way to win.
Download or read book To the River s End written by William W. Johnstone and published by Kensington Books. This book was released on 2021-09-28 with total page 327 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An epic saga based on true events of the American West—with the trailblazing fur trappers and the mountain men who lived it. This is an unforgettable journey into the untamed American frontier. Where nature is cruel, violence lurks behind every tree, and where only the strongest of the strong survive. This is a story of America. TO THE RIVER’S END Luke Ransom was just eighteen years old when he answered an ad in a St. Louis newspaper that would change his life forever. The American Fur Company needed one-hundred enterprising men to travel up the Missouri River—the longest in North America—all the way to its source. They would hunt and trap furs for one, two, or three years. Along the way, they would face unimaginable hardships: grueling weather, wild animals, hunger, exhaustion, and hostile attacks by the Blackfeet and Arikara. Luke Ransom was one of the brave men chosen for the job—and one of the few to survive . . . Five years later, Luke is a seasoned trapper and hunter, a master of his trade. The year is 1833, and the American Fur Company is sending him to the now-famous Rendezvous at Green River. For Luke, it may be his last job for the company. After facing death countless times, he is ready to strike out on his own. But when he encounters a fellow trapper under attack by Indians, his life takes an unexpected turn. A new friendship is forged in blood. And a dangerous new journey begins…
Download or read book The River written by Peter Heller and published by Knopf. This book was released on 2019 with total page 273 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A NATIONAL BESTSELLER "A fiery tour de force... I could not put this book down. It truly was terrifying and unutterably beautiful." -Alison Borden, The Denver Post From the best-selling author of The Dog Stars, the story of two college students on a wilderness canoe trip--a gripping tale of a friendship tested by fire, white water, and violence Wynn and Jack have been best friends since freshman orientation, bonded by their shared love of mountains, books, and fishing. Wynn is a gentle giant, a Vermont kid never happier than when his feet are in the water. Jack is more rugged, raised on a ranch in Colorado where sleeping under the stars and cooking on a fire came as naturally to him as breathing. When they decide to canoe the Maskwa River in northern Canada, they anticipate long days of leisurely paddling and picking blueberries, and nights of stargazing and reading paperback Westerns. But a wildfire making its way across the forest adds unexpected urgency to the journey. When they hear a man and woman arguing on the fog-shrouded riverbank and decide to warn them about the fire, their search for the pair turns up nothing and no one. But: The next day a man appears on the river, paddling alone. Is this the man they heard? And, if he is, where is the woman? From this charged beginning, master storyteller Peter Heller unspools a headlong, heart-pounding story of desperate wilderness survival.
Download or read book Goodbye to a River written by John Graves and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2010-11-10 with total page 324 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the 1950s, a series of dams was proposed along the Brazos River in north-central Texas. For John Graves, this project meant that if the stream’s regimen was thus changed, the beautiful and sometimes brutal surrounding countryside would also change, as would the lives of the people whose rugged ancestors had eked out an existence there. Graves therefore decided to visit that stretch of the river, which he had known intimately as a youth. Goodbye to a River is his account of that farewell canoe voyage. As he braves rapids and fatigue and the fickle autumn weather, he muses upon old blood feuds of the region and violent skirmishes with native tribes, and retells wild stories of courage and cowardice and deceit that shaped both the river’s people and the land during frontier times and later. Nearly half a century after its initial publication, Goodbye to a River is a true American classic, a vivid narrative about an exciting journey and a powerful tribute to a vanishing way of life and its ever-changing natural environment.
Download or read book At the End of the River written by David Paton and published by ATF Press. This book was released on 2010-12-31 with total page 260 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Beautifully presented and written by one of the Coorong's most knowledgeable ecologists, 'At the end of the River' is an essential read for those responsible for making the decisions that will determine its future.
Download or read book The River written by Gary Paulsen and published by Ember. This book was released on 2012-03-13 with total page 178 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The government sends Brian back to the Canadian wilderness in this beloved follow-up to the award-winning classic Hatchet from three-time Newbery Honor-winning author Gary Paulsen! Two years after Brian Robeson survived fifty-four days alone in the Canadian wilderness, the government wants him to head back so they can learn what he did to stay alive. This time Derek Holtzer, a government psychologist, will accompany him. But a freak storm leaves Derek unconscious. Brian's only hope is to transport Derek a hundred miles down the river to a trading post. He's survived with only a hatchet before--now can Brian build a raft and navigate an unknown river? For the first time it's not only Brian's survival that's at stake. . . An IRA-CBC Children’s Choice A Parents Magazine Best Book of the Year “Vividly written, a book that will, as intended, please the readers who hoped that Paulsen, like Brian, would ‘do it again.’” —Kirkus Reviews Read all the Hatchet Adventures! Brian's Winter The River Brian's Return Brian's Hunt
Download or read book The End of the River written by Brian Harvey and published by ECW Press. This book was released on 2008-11-01 with total page 567 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “[Harvey] may have created a new literary genre: science travel writing . . . travelogue, autobiography, history, and even fantasy romp alongside the biology” (Quill & Quire). When biologist Brian Harvey saw a thousand fish blundering into a Brazilian dam, he asked the obvious: What’s going to happen to them? The End of the River is the story of his long search for an answer. Harvey takes readers from a fisheries patrol boat on the Fraser River to the great Tsukiji fish market in Japan, with stops in the Philippines, Thailand, and assorted South American countries. Finally, in the arid outback of northeast Brazil, against a backdrop of a multi-billion-dollar river project nobody seems to want, he finds a small-scale answer to his simple question. In recounting his journey, he populates his story with characters both real and imagined, human and otherwise—a six-foot endangered catfish; a Canadian professor with a weakness for Thai bar girls; a chain-smoking Brazilian with a passion for her river; a drug-addled stick-up artist. The End of the River is about fishermen, fish farmers, and fish cops; there are scientists and shysters as well as a few Colombian narcotráficos and some very drunk, very hairy Brazilian men in thongs. From the founder of the World Fisheries Trust, Harvey introduces a new kind of writing about the environment, as far off the beaten track as you can get in a Land Rover driven by a female Colombian biologist whose favorite expression is “No hay via!”—meaning, “no road!” “[A] freewheeling and vividly written essay on the mysteries and longings of what it is to be human in a world of cynicism and loss—and more significantly, what it is to be hopeful, to persevere, in the search for redemption and beauty . . . A brilliant and instructive book . . . recalls the travel writing of one of Harvey’s heroes, Sir Richard Burton.” —The Globe and Mail (Toronto)
Download or read book The Star at the End of the River written by Paul Vincent and published by iUniverse. This book was released on 2011-04-20 with total page 189 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From an early age, author Paul Vincent has looked forward with joyful anticipation to sunsets and oncoming darkness, an attitude that appears to be counter to the scriptural counsels of his own faith community. In The Star at the End of the River, Vincent shares his important life experiences in order to describe a transformative spirituality of the night. Bringing to bear his forty years experience as an amateur astronomer, the author shows how sustained night-sky observation enhances the human receptivity to transcendent departure. Of the many treasures of the heavens, Vincent finds particular solace in a star he has never seenwhich, for that very reason, he regards as the most apt symbol of the human hope for eternal joy. The Star at the End of the River proposes a new kind of spiritual journeyan ascent, not of a mountain, as in the traditional imagery, but of an inclined plane. Vincent invites his readers to become contemplatives of the ordinary and to discover the mystical power of such commonplace objects and occurrences as road signs, supermarket aisles, interior stairways, gooseflesh, and penmanship.
Download or read book Death on the River written by John Wilson and published by Orca Book Publishers. This book was released on 2009-10 with total page 204 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A young soldier survives a Confederate prison camp during the Civil War.
Download or read book The Rock and the River written by Kekla Magoon and published by Aladdin. This book was released on 2010-04-06 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Winner of the ALA Coretta Scott King–John Steptoe New Talent Award, The Rock and the River was described in a Booklist starred review as a “taut, eloquent first novel [that] will make readers feel what it was like to be young, black, and militant.” The Time: 1968 The Place: Chicago For thirteen-year-old Sam it’s not easy being the son of known civil rights activist Roland Childs. Especially when his older (and best friend), Stick, begins to drift away from him for no apparent reason. And then it happens: Sam finds something that changes everything forever. Sam has always had faith in his father, but when he finds literature about the Black Panthers under Stick’s bed, he’s not sure who to believe: his father or his best friend. Suddenly, nothing feels certain anymore. Sam wants to believe that his father is right: You can effect change without using violence. But as time goes on, Sam grows weary of standing by and watching as his friends and family suffer at the hands of racism in their own community. Sam beings to explore the Panthers with Stick, but soon he’s involved in something far more serious—and more dangerous—than he could have ever predicted. Sam is faced with a difficult decision. Will he follow his father or his brother? His mind or his heart? The rock or the river?
Download or read book The River s End written by James Oliver Curwood and published by The Floating Press. This book was released on 2012-10-01 with total page 188 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this pulse-racing thriller from famed action-adventure writer James Oliver Curwood, a man who has been accused of a horrific offense under mysterious circumstances is given a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to clear his name as a result of a bizarre series of coincidences. Fans of outdoor adventure novels will love The River's End.
Download or read book Those Across the River written by Christopher Buehlman and published by Berkley. This book was released on 2020-01-28 with total page 354 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A man must confront a terrifying evil in this captivating horror novel that's "as much F. Scott Fitzgerald as Dean Koontz."* Haunted by memories of the Great War, failed academic Frank Nichols and his wife have arrived in the sleepy Georgia town of Whitbrow, where Frank hopes to write a history of his family's old estate--the Savoyard Plantation--and the horrors that occurred there. At first their new life seems to be everything they wanted. But under the facade of summer socials and small-town charm, there is an unspoken dread that the townsfolk have lived with for generations. A presence that demands sacrifice. It comes from the shadowy woods across the river, where the ruins of the Savoyard Plantation still stand. Where a long-smoldering debt of blood has never been forgotten. Where it has been waiting for Frank Nichols....
Download or read book A River Runs through It and Other Stories written by Norman MacLean and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2017-05-03 with total page 263 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The New York Times–bestselling classic set amid the mountains and streams of early twentieth-century Montana, “as beautiful as anything in Thoreau or Hemingway” (Chicago Tribune). When Norman Maclean sent the manuscript of A River Runs Through It and Other Stories to New York publishers, he received a slew of rejections. One editor, so the story goes, replied, “it has trees in it.” Today, the title novella is recognized as one of the great American tales of the twentieth century, and Maclean as one of the most beloved writers of our time. The finely distilled product of a long life of often surprising rapture—for fly-fishing, for the woods, for the interlocked beauty of life and art—A River Runs Through It has established itself as a classic of the American West filled with beautiful prose and understated emotional insights. Based on Maclean’s own experiences as a young man, the book’s two novellas and short story are set in the small towns and mountains of western Montana. It is a world populated with drunks, loggers, card sharks, and whores, but also one rich in the pleasures of fly-fishing, logging, cribbage, and family. By turns raunchy and elegiac, these superb tales express, in Maclean’s own words, “a little of the love I have for the earth as it goes by.” “Maclean’s book—acerbic, laconic, deadpan—rings out of a rich American tradition that includes Mark Twain, Kin Hubbard, Richard Bissell, Jean Shepherd, and Nelson Algren.” —New York Times Book Review Includes a new foreword by Robert Redford, director of the Academy Award–winning film adaptation
Download or read book The River written by Michael Neale and published by HarperChristian + ORM. This book was released on 2012-09-17 with total page 321 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “The River is a story that will transform how you see yourself and the world.” —Andy Andrews, New York Times best-selling author of The Noticer, The Traveler’s Gift, and How Do You Kill 11 Million People? “You were made for The River . . .” Gabriel Clarke is mysteriously drawn to The River, a ribbon of frothy white water carving its way through steep canyons high in the Colorado Rockies. The rushing waters beckon him to experience freedom and adventure. But something holds him back—the memory of the terrible event he witnessed on The River when he was just five years old—something no child should ever see. Chains of fear and resentment imprison Gabriel, keeping him from discovering the treasures of The River. He remains trapped, afraid to take hold of the life awaiting him. When he returns to The River after years away, his heart knows he is finally home. His destiny is within reach. Claiming that destiny will be the hardest—and bravest—thing he has ever done.
Download or read book Lost in River of Grass written by Ginny Rorby and published by Carolrhoda Lab ®. This book was released on 2013-08-01 with total page 198 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "I don't realize I'm crying until he glances at me. For a moment, I see the look of anguish in his eyes, then he blinks it away and slips off into the water. I immediately think of the gator. It's still down there somewhere. . . ." A science-class field trip to the Everglades is supposed to be fun, but Sarah's new at Glades Academy, and her fellow freshmen aren’t exactly making her feel welcome. When an opportunity for an unauthorized side trip on an air boat presents itself, it seems like a perfect escape—an afternoon without feeling like a sore thumb. But one simple oversight turns a joyride into a race for survival across the river of grass. Sarah will have to count on her instincts—and a guy she barely knows—if they have any hope of making it back alive.
Download or read book Marjory Stoneman Douglas written by Marjory Stoneman Douglas and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2014-10-01 with total page 273 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Born in Minnesota in 1890 and raised and educated in Massachusetts, Marjory Stoneman Douglas came to Florida in 1915 to work for her father, who had just started a newspaper called the Herald in a small town called Miami. In this "frontier" town, she recovered from a misjudged marriage, learned to write journalism and fiction and drama, took on the fight for feminism and racial justice and conservation long before those causes became popular, and embarked on a long and uncommonly successful voyage into self-understanding. Way before women did this sort of thing, she recognized her own need for solitude and independence, and built her own little house away from town in an area called Coconut Grove. She still lives there, as she has for over 40 years, with her books and cats and causes, emerging frequently to speak, still a powerful force in ecopolitics. Marjory Stoneman Douglas begins this story of her life by admitting that "the hardest thing is to tell the truth about oneself" and ends it stating her belief that "life should be lived so vividly and so intensely that thoughts of another life, or a longer life, are not necessary." The voice that emerges in between is a voice from the past and a voice from the future, a voice of conviction and common sense with a sense of humor, a voice so many audiences have heard over the years—tough words in a genteel accent emerging from a tiny woman in a floppy hat—which has truly become the voice of the river.
Download or read book Home Waters written by John N. Maclean and published by HarperCollins. This book was released on 2021-06-01 with total page 227 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “Beautiful. ... A lyrical companion to his father’s classic, A River Runs through It, chronicling their family’s history and bond with Montana’s Blackfoot River.” —Washington Post A "poetic" and "captivating" (Publishers Weekly) memoir about the power of place to shape generations, Home Waters is John N. Maclean's remarkable chronicle of his family's century-long love affair with Montana's majestic Blackfoot River, the setting for his father's classic novella, A River Runs through It. Maclean returns annually to the simple family cabin that his grandfather built by hand, still in search of the trout of a lifetime. When he hooks it at last, decades of longing promise to be fulfilled, inspiring John, reporter and author, to finally write the story he was born to tell. A book that will resonate with everyone who feels deeply rooted to a landscape, Home Waters is a portrait of a family who claimed a river, from one generation to the next, of how this family came of age in the 20th century and later as they scattered across the country, faced tragedy and success, yet were always drawn back to the waters that bound them together. Here are the true stories behind the beloved characters fictionalized in A River Runs through It, including the Reverend Maclean, the patriarch who introduced the family to fishing; Norman, who balanced a life divided between literature and the tug of the rugged West; and tragic yet luminous Paul (played by Brad Pitt in Robert Redford’s film adaptation), whose mysterious death has haunted the family and led John to investigate his uncle’s murder and reveal new details in these pages. A universal story about nature, family, and the art of fly fishing, Maclean’s memoir beautifully captures the inextricable ways our personal histories are linked to the places we come from—our home waters. Featuring twelve wood engravings by Wesley W. Bates and a map of the Blackfoot River region.
