American Odyssey

“This quietly profound book belongs on the shelf next to Jon Krakauer’s Into the Wild.” —The New York Times The riveting true story of Dick Conant, an American folk hero who, over the course of more than twenty years, canoed solo thousands of miles of American rivers—and then disappeared near the Outer Banks of North Carolina. This book “contains everything: adventure, mystery, travelogue, and unforgettable characters” (David Grann, best-selling author of Killers of the Flower Moon). For decades, Dick Conant paddled the rivers of America, covering the Mississippi, Yellowstone, Ohio, Hudson, as well as innumerable smaller tributaries. These solo excursions were epic feats of planning, perseverance, and physical courage. At the same time, Conant collected people wherever he went, creating a vast network of friends and acquaintances who would forever remember this brilliant and charming man even after a single meeting. Ben McGrath, a staff writer at The New Yorker, was one of those people. In 2014 he met Conant by chance just north of New York City as Conant paddled down the Hudson, headed for Florida. McGrath wrote a widely read article about their encounter, and when Conant's canoe washed up a few months later, without any sign of his body, McGrath set out to find the people whose lives Conant had touched--to capture a remarkable life lived far outside the staid confines of modern existence. Riverman is a moving portrait of a complex and fascinating man who was as troubled as he was charismatic, who struggled with mental illness and self-doubt, and was ultimately unable to fashion a stable life for himself; who traveled alone and yet thrived on connection and brought countless people together in his wake. It is also a portrait of an America we rarely see: a nation of unconventional characters, small river towns, and long-forgotten waterways.

A history of the United States in the twentieth century, featuring sociological and cultural events, as well as strictly historical, and using many pertinent literary excerpts.

The African American Odyssey is a literary compilation of a portrait combined with a strong compelling chronological history and discussion of the African American plight, from an African American perspective. It also entails many significant aspects of African American struggles, achievements and wondering about in a country that adamantly refuses to see African Americans. Propelled by enthusiasm, anguish, and deep concern for the magnitude of social and economic despaired conditions African Americans find themselves in today, the author is obsessed with confronting the pervassive challenges of systemic and institutionalized white supremacy, unjustified evil racist oppression, suffering and unnecessary social and economic misery perpetrated against African Americans by a hatefully hostile government determined to marginalize or exterminate them. Exasperatingly, Muhammad expressively takes the reader on a journey through centuries of convoluted wondering while illustrating to them, the events that produced the African American experience. He conclusively shares his hope, skepticism and cautious optimism for the future of African Americans.

This book illuminates the professional career and private lives of J. McCants Stewart--a Reconstruction-era lawyer, minister, politician, and political activist--and his descendants over three generations, providing an epic account of an African-American family in America. (Adapted from book jacket)

Seamus Heaney’s American Odyssey describes, with a new archive of correspondence, interviews, and working drafts, the some 40 years that Seamus Heaney spent in the United States as a teacher, lecturer, friend, and colleague, and as an active poet on the reading circuit. It is anchored by Heaney’s appointments at Berkeley and Harvard, but it also follows Heaney’s readings “on the road” at three important points in his career. It argues that Heaney was initially receptive to American poetry and culture while his career was still plastic, but as he developed more assurance and fame, he became much more critical of America as a superpower, especially in the military reaction to 9/11. This study emphasizes “the heard Heaney” as much as the “writerly Heaney” by listening in on key poetry readings at different times and to recorded but unpublished lectures on American and British poets at Harvard. It includes accounts by his creative writing students, aspiring poets, who testify to his mentoring as well as modeling for them how one can be “a poet in the world” as he was most strikingly.