Max McCoy - Böcker

The upper Arkansas River courses through the heart of America from its headwaters near the Continental Divide above Leadville, Colorado, to Arkansas City, just above the Kansas-Oklahoma border. Max McCoy embarked on a trip of 742 miles in search of the river's unique story. Part adventure and part reflection, steeped in the natural and cultural history of the Arkansas Valley, Elevations is McCoy’s account of that journey. Going by kayak when he can—by Jeep, on foot, or by other means when he has to—McCoy takes us with him, navigating the Arkansas River as it reveals its nature and tests his own. Along the way, and when he isn’t battling the current for his overturned kayak; braving a frigid Christmas Eve along the river; or joining the search for a drowning victim, he steps out to explore the world beyond the river’s banks. Here for instance is Camp Amache, where Japanese Americans were imprisoned during World War II. Here is Ludlow, where thirteen women and children died in a standoff between striking coal miners and the militia in 1914. Farther along we find Sand Creek, site of a massacre by US soldiers in 1864, and, uncomfortably close, Garden City, where white supremacists were charged with planning a terror attack on Somali refugees in 2016.Whether traveling back in time, pausing in the present, or looking forward, Elevations captures the Arkansas River in its thrilling moments and placid stretches, in its natural splendor and degradation at human hands. The book shows us the river as a flowing repository of human history and, in the telling of this gifted writer, as a life-changing experience.

A gripping investigation of the violent murder of two women at the hands of religious, anti-government extremists in the Oklahoma Panhandle—and a profound search for the nature of good and evil in one of the most fiercely independent and traditionally conservative corners of America.On the day before Easter in 2024, Veronica Butler and Jilian Kelley went missing. Butler, 27, was embroiled in a custody battle for her children with their paternal grandmother and Kelley, 39, was a court-approved supervisor for the day’s visitation. They were on their way from rural Kansas to the Oklahoma Panhandle to celebrate Butler’s daughter’s sixth birthday. But they never arrived.Family members found Butler’s blue Kia on a lonely dirt road south of the state line. Blood, broken glasses, a pistol magazine, and a shattered hammer littered the scene, but the women were gone. Weeks later, the children’s grandmother and Butler’s legal antagonist, along with four others, were arrested on suspicion of murder. All were members of a religious, anti-government group that called themselves “God’s Misfits.” Authorities later recovered the bodies of Butler and Kelley from a chest freezer buried deep in a cow pasture. The murders shocked the conscience of the panhandle community and left many asking how such violence could occur in a place with a proud tradition of faith and fair play.A riveting blend of true crime and moral inquiry, God’s Misfits goes far deeper than the sensational headlines. Through rigorous, exclusive reporting and fast-paced storytelling, Max McCoy peels back the layers of a rural community steeped in conservative politics, deep faith, and generational distrust of government—fertile ground for the sovereign-citizen ideology, conspiratorial thinking, and violent imagination that gripped God’s Misfits. In his tireless search for the nature of good and evil, McCoy reveals how devotion warps into zealotry, how patriotism is weaponized, and how backroads communities quietly incubate extremism. God’s Misfits forces us to confront the fault lines of our society and ask what these murders tell us about the soul of the heartland.

Winner: National Outdoor Book AwardA Kansas Notable BookThe upper Arkansas River courses through the heart of America from its headwaters near the Continental Divide above Leadville, Colorado, to Arkansas City, just above the Kansas-Oklahoma border. Max McCoy embarked on a trip of 742 miles in search of the river’s unique story. Part adventure and part reflection, steeped in the natural and cultural history of the Arkansas Valley, Elevations is McCoy’s account of that journey.Going by kayak when he can—by Jeep, on foot, or by other means when he has to—McCoy takes us with him, navigating the Arkansas River as it reveals its nature and tests his own. Along the way, and when he isn’t battling the current for his overturned kayak; braving a frigid Christmas Eve along the river; or joining the search for a drowning victim, he steps out to explore the world beyond the river’s banks. Here for instance is Camp Amache, where Japanese Americans were imprisoned during World War II. Here is Ludlow, where thirteen women and children died in a standoff between striking coal miners and the militia in 1914. Farther along we find Sand Creek, site of a massacre by US soldiers in 1864, and, uncomfortably close, Garden City, where white supremacists were charged with planning a terror attack on Somali refugees in 2016.Whether traveling back in time, pausing in the present, or looking forward, Elevations captures the Arkansas River in its thrilling moments and placid stretches, in its natural splendor and degradation at human hands. The book shows us the river as a flowing repository of human history and, in the telling of this gifted writer, as a life-changing experience.