Dispatches From Pluto

In Dispatches from Pluto, adventure writer Richard Grant takes on “the most American place on Earth”—the enigmatic, beautiful, often derided Mississippi Delta. Richard Grant and his girlfriend were living in a shoebox apartment in New York City when they decided on a whim to buy an old plantation house in the Mississippi Delta. Dispatches from Pluto—winner of the Pat Conroy Southern Book Prize—is their journey of discovery into this strange and wonderful American place. Imagine A Year In Provence with alligators and assassins, or Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil with hunting scenes and swamp-to-table dining. On a remote, isolated strip of land, three miles beyond the tiny community of Pluto, Richard and his girlfriend, Mariah, embark on a new life. They learn to hunt, grow their own food, and fend off alligators, snakes, and varmints galore. They befriend an array of unforgettable local characters—blues legend T-Model Ford, cookbook maven Martha Foose, catfish farmers, eccentric millionaires, and the actor Morgan Freeman. Grant brings an adept, empathetic eye to the fascinating people he meets, capturing the rich, extraordinary culture of the Delta, while tracking its utterly bizarre and criminal extremes. Reporting from all angles as only an outsider can, Grant also delves deeply into the Delta’s lingering racial tensions. He finds that de facto segregation continues. Yet even as he observes major structural problems, he encounters many close, loving, and interdependent relationships between black and white families—and good reasons for hope. Dispatches from Pluto is a book as unique as the Delta itself. It’s lively, entertaining, and funny, containing a travel writer’s flair for in-depth reporting alongside insightful reflections on poverty, community, and race. It’s also a love story, as the nomadic Grant learns to settle down. He falls not just for his girlfriend but for the beguiling place they now call home. Mississippi, Grant concludes, is the best-kept secret in America.

Please note: This is a companion version & not the original book. Sample Book Insights: #1 I met with Mike and his wife, Beth, who kindly offered to lend me the money to buy their house. I was grateful for the offer, but the American mortgage industry was acting sober and averse to low-level risks like me. #2 I bought a house in Mississippi, and it was so easy that I was suspicious. Everyone was incredibly kind and helpful, and I had the sensation of hovering above myself as I signed 18 different legal documents. #3 I had bought a house down near Yazoo City. I was moving in, and the man across the street told me the story of Emmett Till, a white boy who had been killed in Money in 1955. He had no sympathy for the boy whatsoever. #4 I had a very different experience being a resident of Mississippi than a visitor. I realized that I couldn’t just write off the people of Money as racist, because they had suffered from racial violence and injustice for far longer than I had been alive.

"Natchez, Mississippi, once had more millionaires per capita than anywhere else in America, and its wealth was built on slavery and cotton. Today it has the greatest concentration of antebellum mansions in the South, and a culture full of unexpected contradictions. Prominent white families dress up in hoopskirts and Confederate uniforms for ritual celebrations of the Old South, yet Natchez is also progressive enough to elect a gay black man for mayor with 91 percent of the vote"--

A narrative portrait of the Sierra Madre describes the author's numerous journeys into its ungoverned regions, where he consulted with a folk healer and witnessed local violence and lawlessness that eventually threatened his own survival. Original. 75,000 first printing.

An illustrated tour of the landscapes of Mississippi that have inspired the state’s many lauded writers, from Faulkner and Welty to Morris and Ward.

There are many ways to die in the Sierra Madre, a notorious nine-hundred-mile mountain range in northern Mexico where AK-47s are fetish objects, the law is almost non-existent and power lies in the hands of brutal drug mafias. Thousands of tons of opium and marijuana are produced there every year. Richard Grant thought it would be a good idea to travel the length of the Sierra Madre and write a book about it. He was warned before he left that he would be killed. But driven by what he calls 'an unfortunate fascination' for this mysterious region, Grant sets off anyway. In a remarkable piece of investigative writing, he evokes a sinister, surreal landscape of lonely mesas, canyons sometimes deeper than the Grand Canyon, hostile villages and an outlaw culture where homicide is the most common cause of death and grandmothers sell cocaine. Finally his luck runs out and he finds himself fleeing for his life, pursued by men who would murder a stranger in their territory 'to please the trigger finger'.

From the acclaimed author of Dispatches From Pluto and Deepest South of All comes a rollicking travelogue from East Africa. NO ONE TRAVELS QUITE LIKE RICHARD GRANT and, really, no one should. In his last book, the adventure classic God’s Middle Finger, he narrowly escaped death in Mexico’s lawless Sierra Madre. Now, Grant has plunged with his trademark recklessness, wit, and curiosity into East Africa. Setting out to make the first descent of an unexplored river in Tanzania, he gets waylaid in Zanzibar by thieves, whores, and a charismatic former golf pro before crossing the Indian Ocean in a rickety cargo boat. And then the real adventure begins. Known to local tribes as “the river of bad spirits,” the Malagarasi River is a daunting adversary even with a heavily armed Tanzanian crew as travel companions. Dodging bullets, hippos, and crocodiles, Grant finally emerges in war-torn Burundi, where he befriends some ethnic street gangsters and trails a notorious man-eating crocodile known as Gustave. He concludes his journey by interviewing the dictatorial president of Rwanda and visiting the true source of the Nile. Gripping, illuminating, sometimes harrowing, often hilarious, Crazy River is a brilliantly rendered account of a modern-day exploration of Africa, and the unraveling of Grant’s peeled, battered mind as he tries to take it all in.

The bestselling author of Dispatches from Pluto and The Deepest South of All turns his sharp wit and observational powers on the epicenter of America’s most divisive issues: Arizona. When Richard Grant and his wife moved with their four-year-old daughter back to Tucson, Arizona, where the couple first met, he expected to easily rekindle his love of the region. Instead, he found a housing market gone haywire, rampant election conspiracies, and right-wing political violence alarmingly close to his home and family. Undocumented immigration was surging, and the state was also on the front lines of climate change, breaking heat and drought records, and running out of long-term water supplies. Under these circumstances, Grant wondered how he might raise a happy, well-adjusted child who believes in the future. Yet these concerns weren’t keeping people away: Arizona was simultaneously experiencing some of the nation’s highest population growth. In A Race to the Bottom of Crazy, Grant mixes memoir, research, and reporting in a quest to understand what makes Arizona such a confounding and irresistible place. He visits the world’s largest machine-gun shoot; takes a sunset boat cruise with a US Congressman and a group of far-right patriots; rides through the desert with a Border Patrol agent; and goes camping with his family in breathtaking mountain ranges that rise out of the desert like islands in the sky. Interspersed with these adventures are recollections of his previous stint in the state, including his friendship with cult writer Charles Bowden and years living off the grid with smugglers, dope farmers, and outlaws on the Mexican border. Ultimately, Grant arrives at the conclusion that Arizona has always been a scattershot improvisation, with bizarre and extreme behavior in its DNA. This book is an entertaining, illuminating, and essential guide to understanding modern America at its most overheated.

This lovely and important work from Howard Sasportas teaches us how to respond to the transits of Uranus,Neptune and Pluto with calmness and a knowledge that the more we work with them, the more worthwhile will be the end result.

Vols. for 1921-1969 include annual bibliography, called 1921-1955, American bibliography; 1956-1963, Annual bibliography; 1964-1968, MLA international bibliography.

Sounding 6 begins with Bain Attwood’s thesis Blacks & Lohans and an echo titled SEX & SORROW EAST OF MELBOURNE. Then Henry Meyrick’s frontier life and death in Western Port and Gipps Land leads into Echo 93: TAMING MELBOURNE BAYSIDE & THE DANDENONGS. Turning to OPENING GIPPSLAND: elite squatters at Sale are contrasted by surviving Kooris on Jackson’s Track. The narrative then backtracks in time with Echo 95: CONTRIBUTIONS TO TRUTH ABOUT SLAUGHTER IN GIPPSLAND comprising the Porter, Cox, Fels and Gardner versions of the blood-stained land-grab. Fels then reports on the Native Police actions and Morgan’s recent overview of the Ganai before and after white settlement concludes the shameful issues long denied or excused. Echo 96: LIAR’S LUNCH charts the rise and fall of pioneer Angus McMillan MP before the focus shifts to the historical geography of East Gippsland clans and languages and on to missionary Bulmer at Lake Tyers with the stories of the payback of Hopping Kitty and Attwood’s study of Brataualung man Tarra Bobby. Alfred Howitt’s birthing of Oz anthropology with his opus The Native Tribes of South-east Australia published at the start of the 20th century is the source material of several echoes on the making of ‘clever’ men and on songs and song-makers. Sounding 6 closes with extracts reprinted from Professor Elkin’s Aboriginal Men of High Degree – their personality and ‘making’, the powers of medicine men, and in conclusion Echo 106: ABORIGINAL MEN OF HIGH DEGREE IN A CHANGING WORLD.

This original analysis of the Middle East water problems highlights questions and issues which have so far only received minimal attention. The author develops a multi-layered account of the nature and causes of the conflict and the Pealestinian water crisis. Each chapter addresses a particular aspect of the Israeli-Palestine water conflict and the author uses these to illustrate both the broader nature of Israeli-Palestinian relations and factors that the existing water literature underplays or simply gets wrong. The book should interest students, scholars and practitioners in a wide range of disciplines including Middle East studies, politics and international relations, water policy, geography, environmental studies and environmental management.

The main aim of the book is to provide a forum for opinions held by Arabs who are neither Western puppets nor fanatical nationalists or Islamists, but rather academics with a vast knowledge of the Middle East as well as of the West. The authors all support the building of a democratic secular Middle East, but their writings also show that although there is no easy way to achieve this goal, neither is there any excuse for not making the attempt. Contributors: Nader Fergany author of the Arab Human Development Reports; Raymond Hinnebusch professor of International Relations and Middle East Politics, University of St. Andrews; Yezid Sayigh consultant to the international donor community in Palestine; Samir Aita Syrian scholar and dissident; Graham Usher British journalist; Hanan Rabbani Palestinian consultant for Amnesty International; Mai Yamani (Saudi Arabia) research fellow with the Middle East Programme at the Royal Institute of International Affairs, Chatham House; Fowziyah Abu-Khalid Saudi sociologist; Amal Shlash Iraq; Huda Al-Nu'aimi Iraq; Jgen S. Nielsen Professor, director of the Danish Institute in Damascus.

ince the 1993 Oslo Accords, the Occupied Palestinian Territory has been the subject of extensive international peacebuilding and statebuilding efforts coordinated by Western donor states and international finance institutions. Despite their failure to yield peace or Palestinian statehood, the role of these organisations in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is generally overlooked owing to their depiction as tertiary actors engaged in technical missions.

Fascinated by the land of endless horizons, sunshine, and the open road, Richard Grant spent fifteen years wandering throughout the United States, never spending more than three weeks in one place, and getting to know America's nomads.In a richly comic travelogue, Grant uses these lives and his own to examine the myths and realities of the wandering life, and its contradiction with the sedentary American dream.

This remarkable book examines how the Islamist movement and its competition with secular-nationalist factions have transformed the identities of ordinary Palestinians since the first Palestinian uprising, or intifada, of the late 1980s. Drawing upon his years living in the region and more than eighty in-depth interviews, Loren Lybarger offers a riveting account of how activists within a society divided by religion, politics, class, age, and region have forged new identities in response to shifting conditions of occupation, peace negotiations, and the fragmentation of Palestinian life. Lybarger personally witnessed the tragic days of the first intifada, the subsequent Oslo Peace Process and its failures, and the new escalation of violence with the second intifada in 2000. He rejects the simplistic notion that Palestinians inevitably fall into one of two camps: pragmatists who are willing to accept territorial compromise, and extremists who reject compromise in favor of armed struggle. Listening carefully to Palestinians themselves, he reveals that the conflicts evident among the Islamists and secular nationalists are mirrored by the internal struggles and divided loyalties of individual Palestinians. Identity and Religion in Palestine is the first book of its kind in English to capture so faithfully the rich diversity of voices from this troubled part of the world. Lybarger provides vital insights into the complex social dynamics through which Islamism has reshaped what it means to be Palestinian.

The 1994 Oslo accords between Israel and the Palestinians were hailed as the start of a process that would bring about resolution of the Israeli-Arab conflict. Five years later, Oslo must be judged a failure. For the Arab and Islamic world, Israel remains what it was at the outset of Oslo — a pariah state illegally occupying Arab lands.Gaza-based journalist Graham Usher witnessed many of the pivotal events of the peace process, and his insightful new book gives voice to the people of Palestine. In addition to presenting the views of ordinary individuals on the street, the book includes interviews with many of the leading commentators and figures from Palestinian Hamas and Fatah, Lebanese Hezballah, and Shas (the Sephardic Jews within Israel). Among the key figures interviewed are Azmi Bishara (Arab activist/Israeli citizen running for President), Yossi Beilin (former Israeli Labour Cabinet member) Aryeh Deri (Shas), Marwan Barghouti (Fatah), and Ibrahim Ghoshah (Hamas). The collection also contains longer, analytical pieces that describe the rise of Hamas in the occupied territories; the growing authoritarianism of Yassar Arafat's Palestinian Authority; the politics of Hezballah in Lebanon; and the causes behind the nihilistic violence of the Gamaa Islamiyya in Egypt. Dispatches from Palestine offers the contemporary history of a process that has irreversibly changed the nature of the Israeli/Palestinian conflict — and one whose failure is bound to leave its mark on the region and the world in the future.

Tied by history, politics, and faith to all corners of the globe, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict fascinates and infuriates people across the world. Based on new archive research and original interviews, Headlines from the Holy Land explains why this fiercely contested region exerts such a pull over leading correspondents and diplomats.