| Rising Tide: The Great Mississippi Flood of 1927 And How It Changed America | Hardcoverby John M. Barry (Author)
| List Price: | $33.00 | | | Available: | Usually ships in 24 hours |
| | Binding: | Hardcover | | Publisher: | Peter Smith Pub Inc | | Publication Date: | June 30, 2006 | | Sales Rank: | 911,404th |
|
EDITORIAL REVIEWS |
Product Description
In 1927, the Mississippi River swept across an area roughly equal in size to Massachusetts, Connecticut, New Hampshire, and Vermont combined, leaving water as deep as thirty feet on the land stretching from Illinois and Missouri south to the Gulf of Mexico. Close to a million people -- in a nation of 120 million -- were forced out of their homes. Some estimates place the death toll in the thousands. The Red Cross fed nearly 700,000 refugees for months. Rising Tide is the story of this forgotten event, the greatest natural disaster this country has ever known. But it is not simply a tale of disaster. The flood transformed part of the nation and had a major cultural and political impact on the rest. Rising Tide is an American epic about science, race, honor, politics, and society. Rising Tide begins in the 19th century, when the first serious attempts to control the river began. From the engineers and the dominant families in the Delta to the New Orleans elite, Rising Tide tells how the flood changed the face of American and laid the groundwork for the New Deal. |
Amazon.com Review
When Mother Nature rages, the physical results are never subtle. Because we cannot contain the weather, we can only react by tabulating the damage in dollar amounts, estimating the number of people left homeless, and laying the plans for rebuilding. But as John M. Barry expertly details in Rising Tide: The Great Mississippi Flood of 1927 and How It Changed America, some calamities transform much more than the landscape. While tracing the history of the nation's most destructive natural disaster, Barry explains how ineptitude and greed helped cause the flood, and how the policies created to deal with the disaster changed the culture of the Mississippi Delta. Existing racial rifts expanded, helping to launch Herbert Hoover into the White House and shifting the political alliances of many blacks in the process. An absorbing account of a little-known, yet monumental event in American history, Rising Tide reveals how human behavior proved more destructive than the swollen river itself. |
CUSTOMER REVIEWS (Average Customer Rating: 4.5 based on 116 reviews)
|
A Chance Encounter With a Great Author! by Stanley Vandiver (Waupaca, WI USA)  5 Stars
October 07, 2009
I happened across this book at the library, during a very snowy period in Wisconsin last winter. Many thanks to the author, as it is a wonderful book for someone who loves history and a great story. I will never forget it. It really enlightened me as to what factors made up our American history. The events drew my mind to what my grandparent's lives were like in those days. It's not trite to say that this book was riveting, as so few are these days. Very well done!
| |
What a great read by K. Ford (Minneapolis) 5 Stars
September 06, 2009
Rising Tide is a too overlooked book and a must-read. It reads like a novel but it's painfully true. With the great (amazingly great) flood of 1927 as the central character, it's a tale of the river from the mid-17th century, a tale of politics, civil rightsd and New Orleans power eleites. Don't miss it!
| |
America untamed by Quilmiense (USA/Spain) 5 Stars
July 21, 2009
There are several stories here intertwined that make an epic mosaic of Mississippian proportions. The interacial relations always on the background of what the high potentates -both from Washington and otherwise- decided to do with the lives of those under their arrogant and jealous rule, blacks and whites, and otherwise too. All classes of Americans are presented here during those fast and furious years of America's coming-of-age. The genious of America, the enterprising, the ambitions and dreams, and the sheer survival skills against all odds. Alas, America untamed.
Here are the engineers who competed to tame the Mississippi; here are the rich and poor; the genius and the average; the privileged and the oppressed; all together in a land that reminds one of many biblical passages: Eden and the expulsion therefrom; the Deluge, of course ...and not to forget that 'love of money is the root of evil'. I keep wondering if teenage America could have grown to be a real man, and not the mama's boy it's become for good if the leaders of the country then weren't the up-to-no-good rascals they were, and instead, were worthy of the Adamses, Washingtons, Jeffersons and all those who made the country whose flag we now burn and despise.
Well told; not at all in the sanctimonious tone one would expect; fast paced, right to the point, entertaining all the time. A little too technical, perhaps, when dwelling in the engineering chapters of the levees, but nothing serious. Read it, y'all, you Washintongs and Benedict Arnolds.
"The harvest is past,
the summer is ended,
and we are not saved!"
Jer. 8:20
| |
Truth is stranger than fiction by RobRoy (Lakeview, Arkansas) 5 Stars
May 28, 2009
Wonderful book. I could hardly put the book down, and when I did set the book aside I found myself thinking about it. Incredible details of people who lived long ago and how they struggled with challenges and problems. You feel you know these people and places, and how good and not-so-good men make bad decisions (and rationalize bad decisions). Also, you see the Old America changing into the modern age.
| |
Great history, bad style. by Joannes Capillatus (New York, NY)  3 Stars
March 18, 2009
The history in this book - especially dealing with race relations, the placing of thousands of blacks into forced-labor "concentration camps" (as they were called at the time), the rise of Hoover, and the social world of New Orleans - is fantastically interesting and very little known. It will serve as a great quarry for another historian. But the book is only so-so, as Barry turns his characters into caricatures, all of whom want "one thing" and will "do anything to get it." You have to endure 425 pages of writing like this: "Earlier Will had derided as 'rabbits' those men who had fled the city. But he could not tolerate criticism; he could not tolerate public failure; he could not tolerate being treated as irrelevant; he could not tolerate the truth" (335). About one-third of this book is sensationalized lard. That said, it is just about the only treatment available. (For the engineering of the river, though, try John McPhee's Atchafalaya.)
| |
SIMILAR PRODUCTS |
| Lanterns on the Levee: Recollections of a Planter's Son (Library of Southern Civilization)
by William Alexander Percy (Author), Walker Percy (Introduction)
Born and raised in Greenville, Mississippi, within the shelter of old traditions, aristocratic in the best sense, William Alexander Percy in his lifetime (1885–1942) was brought face to face with the convulsions of a changing world. Lanterns on the Levee is his memorial to the South of his youth and young manhood. In describing life in the Mississippi Delta, Percy bridges the interval between the semifeudal South of the 1800s and the anxious South of the early 1940s. The rare qualities of...
| 
| The Most Southern Place on Earth: The Mississippi Delta and the Roots of Regional Identity
by James C. Cobb (Author)
"Cotton obsessed, Negro obsessed," Rupert Vance called it in 1935. "Nowhere but in the Mississippi Delta," he said, "are antebellum conditions so nearly preserved." This crescent of bottomlands between Memphis and Vicksburg, lined by the Yazoo and Mississippi rivers, remains in some ways what it was in 1860: a land of rich soil, wealthy planters, and desperate poverty--the blackest and poorest counties in all the South. And yet it is a cultural treasure house as well--the home of Muddy Waters,...
| 
| The Great Influenza: The story of the deadliest pandemic in history
by John M. Barry (Author)
At the height of WWI, history’s most lethal influenza virus erupted in an army camp in Kansas, moved east with American troops, then exploded, killing as many as 100 million people worldwide. It killed more people in twenty-four months than AIDS killed in twenty-four years, more in a year than the Black Death killed in a century. But this was not the Middle Ages, and 1918 marked the first collision of science and epidemic disease. Magisterial in its breadth of perspective and...
| 
| DEEP'N AS IT COME: THE 1927 MISSISSIPPI RIVER FLOOD
by PETE DANIEL (Author)
| 
| The Long Road to Baghdad: A History of U.S. Foreign Policy from the 1970s to the Present
by Lloyd C. Gardner (Author)
The renowned diplomatic historian looks back at the ideas, policies, and decisions that led from Vietnam to the Iraq War and to America's disastrous new role in the Middle East.
"What will stand out one day is not George W. Bush's uniqueness but the continuum from the Carter Doctrine of 1979 to "Shock and Awe" in 2003."—from The Long Road to Baghdad
In this stunning new narrative of the road to America's "new longest war," one of the nation's premier diplomatic historians...
|
|
|
