Dispatches from Pluto: Lost and Found in the Mississippi Delta
Richard Grant, 2015
Simon & Schuster
320 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781476709642
Summary
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 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. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—1963
• Where—Malaysia
• Raised—Kuwait; London, England, UK
• Education—B.A., University College, London
• Awards—Thomas Cook Travel Book Award
• Currently—lives in Jackson, Mississippi, USA
Richard Grant is a freelance British travel writer based in the U.S. Born in Malaysia, he lived in Kuwait as a boy and then moved to London. He went to school in Hammersmith and received a history degree from University College, London.
Following graduation Grant worked as a security guard, a janitor, a house painter and a club DJ before moving to America where he lived a nomadic life in the American West. Eventually, he settled in Tucson, Arizona, using it as a home base from which to travel.
He supported himself by writing articles for Men's Journal, Esquire and Details, among others. Grant and now wife, Mariah, moved to New York City, briefly, before relocating to Pluto, Mississippi. His experiences living along the Mississippi Delta is the subject of his 2015 book, Dispatches from Pluto: Lost and Found in the Mississippi Delta.
Grant's first book American Nomads (2003) looks at nomadism and people who choose to live on the road in America. It won the 2004 Thomas Cook Travel Book Award. Later, he wrote the 2011 script, based in part on his book, for the BBC documentary of the same name.
His next book God's Middle Finger (2008) is about the lawless region of the Sierra Madre mountains in northwestern Mexico in which Grant traveled. It was nominated for the 2009 Dolman Best Travel Book Award. Grant co-wrote a screenplay about the Mexican border with Johnny Ferguson and Ruben Ruiz entitled Tres Huevos/A Burning Thing.
His third book Crazy River: Exploration and Folly in East Africa (2011) is about Grant's travels in harrowing situations around East Africa, including an attempt at the first descent of the Malagarasi River in Tanzania.
Dispatches from Pluto (2015) describes his move to Pluto, Mississippi, with his now wife Mariah, and the couple's impressions about the Mississippi Delta Tom Zoellner in the New York Times observed "Grant’s British accent doubtlessly served him well, allowing him to move through the tradition-bound society of the Mississippi Delta like a neutron, without obvious allegiances or biases." (From Wikipedia. Retrieved 11/15/2016.)
Book Reviews
[Grant] succeeds, and with flair. His empathic manner, reportorial talent and eye for the unexpected detail make this a chigger-bitten trip that entertains as much as it informs.
New York Times Book Review
Readers with an appetite for a deep-fried version of A Year in Provence will find much to sate them here.... [Grant is] like a deeper and way funkier version of Peter Mayle...it’s the individual voices and anecdotes he records that give Dispatches from Pluto its dissonant lilt and outre charm.
Jonathan Miles - Garden & Gun
One of the best books to have been written about this part of Mississippi. Richard Grant has done something completely different from previous forays into this fascinating and frequently vilified part of America. … Grant’s book strikes a good balance between being partly A Year in Provence, Mississippi-style, and partly a searching investigation of the local culture. This is a man who has done his homework, asked hard questions, and made a point of getting to know everybody, white and black alike.
New Criterion
This book’s great virtue…is how it sets aside assumptions to look with clear, questioning eyes. Mississippi’s landscape, with its ‘crated little town(s)’ and ‘primordial interruptions in the empire of modern agriculture,’ is refreshed by Grant’s lovely prose.
Jackson Clarion-Ledger
Grant writes with an admiration and tenderness for his new home and neighbors. The book’s often riotously funny, particularly when describing real-life crime stories in Greenwood and elsewhere. But Grant’s also thoughtful and earnest in trying to understand race relations in modern-day Mississippi… Grant’s insights as an outsider trying to decipher a new world make this book compelling and also challenging. He’s confronting tough truths and asking hard questions, but from a place of genuine respect and love.
Mississippi Business Journal
Richard Grant gets it. Many authors that write about the Delta may come and stay a few months, then go back to their comfortable hometowns to burn or scathe the Delta’s mores, customs and culture. Richard bought an old plantation house here to become a part of the Delta and he writes about it in a way that brings laughter, astonishment, complexity and perplexity.
Hank Burdine - Delta Magazine
A likely hit with fans of memoirs or travel fiction as well as those who enjoy a well-told story, this is a surprisingly humorous yet insightful read. Grant's writing is relaxed and familiar in the way of great storytellers.—Stacy Shaw, Orange, CA
Library Journal
[Grant] takes us on hunting excursions, to dangerous taverns, a black church..., a school..., and a local political campaign.... But the issue that repeatedly emerges...is race.... An appealing stew of fecklessness and curiosity, social psychology and social dysfunction, hope and despair.
Kirkus Reviews
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