To the River's End

To the River's End PDF Author: William W. Johnstone
Publisher: Kensington Books
ISBN: 1496734521
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 327

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Book Description
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…

To the River's End

To the River's End PDF Author: William W. Johnstone
Publisher: Kensington Books
ISBN: 1496734521
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 327

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Book Description
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…

The End of the River

The End of the River PDF Author: Simon Winchester
Publisher: Scribd, Inc.
ISBN: 109440442X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 57

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Book Description
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.

The Riverbones

The Riverbones PDF Author: Andrew Westoll
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780702237294
Category : Suriname
Languages : en
Pages : 365

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Book Description
In the vein of Theroux and Matthiessen, Andrew Westoll is an eco-travel writer for the new millennium. Suriname is the least travelled country in South America, a little-known land of myth, magic and ecological wonder just north of Brazil. Most of this mysterious nation is covered in pristine rainforest, but this Last Eden has a dark side: environmental destruction, rife pollution and appalling poverty. Andrew Westoll first fell under Suriname's spell when he spent a year studying monkeys deep inside these remote jungles. Five years later, he returned on a quest to uncover the country's mysterious soul. Through harrowing journeys by foot, bus and dugout canoe, Westoll illustrates how the modern struggles for human rights and ecological preservation can often compete with the economic needs of a proud people - with tragic consequences. The Riverbones is a spellbinding tale of survival, heartbreak, mystery and murder - a search for a redemption in a country haunted by a troubled past and an uncertain future.

The River

The River PDF Author: Peter Heller
Publisher: Knopf
ISBN: 0525521879
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 273

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Book Description
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.

A Bend in the River

A Bend in the River PDF Author: V. S. Naipaul
Publisher: Vintage Canada
ISBN: 0735277141
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 355

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Book Description
In the "brilliant novel" (The New York Times) V.S. Naipaul takes us deeply into the life of one man — an Indian who, uprooted by the bloody tides of Third World history, has come to live in an isolated town at the bend of a great river in a newly independent African nation. Naipaul gives us the most convincing and disturbing vision yet of what happens in a place caught between the dangerously alluring modern world and its own tenacious past and traditions.

River's End

River's End PDF Author: Melody Carlson
Publisher: Abingdon Press
ISBN: 142671274X
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 323

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Book Description
With brokenness and humility, three generations of women return to their roots to discover who they are and who they are meant to be.

The Star at the End of the River

The Star at the End of the River PDF Author: Paul Vincent
Publisher: iUniverse
ISBN: 1450282431
Category : Self-Help
Languages : en
Pages : 189

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Book Description
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.

Goodbye to a River

Goodbye to a River PDF Author: John Graves
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 0307773353
Category : Travel
Languages : en
Pages : 324

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Book Description
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.

The End of the River

The End of the River PDF Author: Brian Harvey
Publisher: ECW Press
ISBN: 1554903351
Category : Nature
Languages : en
Pages : 530

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Book Description
“[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)

The River's End

The River's End PDF Author: James Oliver Curwood
Publisher: DigiCat
ISBN:
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 148

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Book Description
"The River's End" is a book centered on the theme of two people; constable Durand Conniston and convict John Keith possessing similar physical attributes. After chasing Keith across the frozen wasteland of the frozen Canadian North for four years, Conniston isn't going to be able to make it back and he has come to greatly admire and like this man he hunted down for his honesty and uprightness. Conniston has a frostbitten lung and a short time to live so Keith 'dies' and a 'new' Conniston is born. Will he be able to fool the discerning eyes of Shan Toug? What will he do when Conniston's sister shows up?