Bissell: 58 books

“Because I myself write books about the Mississippi River, because I used to be a pilot on the Mississippi River . . . the critics for twenty-three years have been calling me ‘a modern Mark Twain.’ Now is this fair?”  So begins a skillful, and frequently hilarious, comparison...

Tom Bissell is a prizewinning writer who published three widely acclaimed books before the age of thirty-four. He is also an obsessive gamer who has spent untold hours in front of his various video game consoles, playing titles such as Far Cry 2, Left 4 Dead, BioShock, and Oblivion for, literally,...

In 1996, Tom Bissell went to Uzbekistan as a na•ve Peace Corps volunteer. Though he lasted only a few months before illness and personal crisis forced him home, Bissell found himself entranced by this remote land. Five years later he returned to explore the shrinking Aral Sea, destroyed by Soviet...

**A profound and moving journey into the heart of Christianity that explores the mysterious and often paradoxical lives and legacies of the Twelve Apostles—a book both for those of the faith and for others who seek to understand Christianity from the outside in. “Expertly researched and...

Award-winning essayist Tom Bissell explores the highs and lows of the creative process. He takes us from the set of The Big Bang Theory to the first novel of Ernest Hemingway to the final work of David Foster Wallace; from the films of Werner Herzog to the film of Tommy Wiseau to the editorial meeting...

America’s Revolutionary War heroes caught in the spotlight by a novelist, humorist, and playwright. Come back stage and find out more about the events of the war and our leaders as the whole show is, ahem, un-costumed. Written with great wit and academic authority (no rube, Mr. Bissell was a Harvard...

Author Richard Bissell worked on the Mississippi most of his life and from the very first page, A Stretch on the River sweeps the reader along much like the river that runs through it – gripping our attention, burbling and chortling, and inspiring wonder.  The narrator joins the crew...

“A river, a very big and powerful river, is the only natural force that can wholly determine the course of human peregrination.” T. S.Eliot Duke Snyder found his first job on “a dirty old cinder-throwing stern-wheeler” when he was sixteen years old with just sixty-five cents left in...

An exploration of the ways that everyday life in the city is defined by commuting. We spend much of our lives in transit to and from work. Although we might dismiss our daily commute as a wearying slog, we rarely stop to think about the significance of these daily journeys. In Transit Life,...

New superintendent, Sid Sorokin, arrives at the Sleep Tite Pajama Factor in Junction City, Iowa, to find himself knee deep in complaints about fans in the pants section, boiling over boilers, nutty letters demanding responses, uncooperative sewing machines, and disgruntled employees who are about...

If anyone had told me I’d be entranced by a book about coal boats moving thirty million tons of coal down the Monongahela River during the 1940’s, well, I would have thought you’d lost your coal stones. I guffawed my way through the first chapter and was pinned to the pages from thereon in....

Veteran Jack Bissell only deepened the abyss between him and his son Tom when he talked about the Vietnam war. But, when a magazine editor sends the two back to Vietnam for a story, Tom reopens the conversation and confronts his father’s past and the man that had seemed impossibly remote. Part history,...

Halfway up Parnassus is a personal account of the University of Toronto with particular emphasis on the period when Dr. Bissell was its president, from 1958 to 1971. The first half of that period was the flowering of the old, self-confident university, with its established patterns of government,...

A riotous parade of historical facts and antidotes about the formation and evolution of Harvard from 1636 – 1962.  Always successful in finding an obscure point or contributing a twist in perception, Bissell tells the story of Harvard's presidents, student life, curriculum, the campus and its...