Elevations

“McCoy uses the natural eastward flow of the Arkansas River as the prime organizing principle for his narrative, but we soon begin to realize that, just biographies of complex individuals, the life story of this river contains a mix of tragedy, heroism, humor, and, in McCoy’s case, the opportunity to confront and wrestle with personal demons and failings.“—Great Plains Research

“Blending journalistic skills with that of a natural-born storyteller, McCoy tells a story of exploration and devastating human disregard.“—Roundup Magazine

“Max McCoy’s Elevations is a sensitive, in-depth view of a river and its human and natural history. McCoy’s prose is as fluid and absorbing as the river itself. The Arkansas’ currents and rivulets embroider human history since before white settlement bent the river toward mining, irrigation, and drinking and waste water. The river’s banks, however, are “where most of our interaction with the river stops and the wildness begins.” Touching and moving, Elevations shows the author’s personal connection with the Arkansas and why the river matters to us as Americans.“—Patrick Dobson, author of Canoeing the Great Plains: A Missouri River Summer and Seldom Seen: A Journey into the Great Plains

“McCoy floats through a valley haunted by gold—not only in mines along the continental divide, but in corporate wheat farms that bleed the Ogallala aquifer and in the fantasies of Coronado—a valley where marijuana is legal but canoeing public waters is not, where the same values that desecrated the river also desecrated its people at Sand Creek and Ludlow, at a Japanese American internment camp, and at immigrant communities in southwest Kansas. In his meticulous search for the story of the Arkansas, McCoy unearths a deeper story of his own personal battles and of America at the dawn of Trump.“—George Frazier, author of The Last Wild Places of Kansas

”Elevations is a Blue Highways kind of book about a swipe of America from Colorado to Oklahoma, down the fabled Arkansas River that in its lower length now flows salt and sand. A riverine biography, it hits all the notes—from past massacres like Ludlow to barely missed modern ones in Garden City, from declining groundwater to ascendant marijuana. The stories are perceptive picks, but best of all is the author’s voice: unsurprised and unflinchingly honest.“—Dan Flores, author of the award-winning books Coyote America and American Serengeti

Max McCoy is an award-winning author and journalist. A Kansan, he taught for seventeen years at Emporia State University, where he was director of the Center for Great Plains Studies. His novels have won three Spur Awards from the Western Writers of America. Elevations was named a Kansas Notable Book and also won the National Outdoor Book Award. He writes a Sunday column for the Kansas Reflector news outlet and has received first place awards from the Kansas Press Association and the National Society of Newspaper Columnists. He and his wife, Kim, live in Emporia, Kansas.