Dispatches from Pluto

What guy hasn't thought about ditching the urban life for a country estate where he at least partially subsists on the birds and deer he took with his own hand? Richard Grant, a British dude living in a 400 square foot apartment in NYC, pulled the trigger on that dream, and his book answers the question, what happens when a British guy and his girlfriend, both living in NYC, buy a 2 acre spread with an aging but otherwise gorgeous home in the Delta backwater of Mississippi? 

The book covers his first year there trying to understand the accents, and the culture. He learns to shoot, hunt, fish, and be friends with completely nice people that are otherwise at least mildly racist. A good chunk of the book is him navigating being friends with people that will drop everything to help a neighbor, spend a day with a chain saw helping him deal with a dead tree, never shows up without food and booze, then casually drops the N word in conversation. 

He also gets familiar with systemic poverty that exists alongside the plantation homes owned by himself and his friends. He hangs out in majority black dive bars, where the conversations sometimes don't sound that different from what you would expect in the trailer across the street with a confederate flag hanging on the front porch. 

Overall, an excellent book with a lot of insight into cultures in my own country that I'm not that familiar with.