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More copies of this ISBN:Rising Tide: The Great Mississippi Flood of 1927 and How It Changed Americaby John M Barry
Staff Pick
"An account of the Mississippi flood of 1927 and how it changed America. When the river flooded, it was possible to travel in a boat, east to west in the South, two hundred miles. The book is an account of how engineers had tried to control the Mississippi for the preceding hundred years and the conflicting theories about how to do that, the attempts and relative success prior to 1927, and how those attempts failed ultimately in '27. The subsequent flooding produced the worst national disaster in American history, resulting in an unknown number of deaths, assumed to be in the thousands. Barry explains how it affected the economic, social, and political environment of the Deep South, predominantly the Delta area. The novelist Walker Percy's family was a dominant force in the Delta at the time, and that's another storyline here — how that powerful family dealt with the flood and the rising power of the Ku Klux Klan. So the book, by talking about the flood, also deals with the politics of the region, immigration, race, its impact on the cotton industry, and ultimately how it made Herbert Hoover President and Huey Long Governor of Louisiana." Synopses & ReviewsFrom Powells.com:In Rising Tide, John
Barry chronicles the events that precipitated and resulted from the Mississippi
flood of 1927, starting with the engineers and committees who battled greedily
— and ultimately foolishly — to master North America's mightiest river.
The flood represented the greatest natural disaster America had ever known; water
claimed the lives of over 1,000 people and the homes of nearly one million, exposing
racism, greed, power politics, and bureaucratic incompetence at every turn while
simultaneously creating national heroes and lasting social change throughout the
Deep South. Hundreds of thousands of African Americans were packed into squalid
refugee camps and many more migrated north and west as the myths of friendly
feudal plantation and sharecropping dissolved behind them. Southern
plantation aristocracy was wiped out and a new elite was created. The Ku Klux
Klan rose in power.
Barry's account of the 1927 flood provides a widely-acclaimed exploration of the reshaping of American culture, economy and politics. Powell's own Michael Powell calls Rising Tide his favorite among his Staff Picks. The book is also the winner of the Francis Parkman Prize, the Southern Book Critics Circle Award, the Lilian Smith Award, and has been named a New York Times Notable Book of the Year. Malia, Powells.com Review:"A gripping account of the mammoth flooding of 1927 that devastated Mississippi and Louisiana and sent political shock waves to Washington...Rising Tide is a brilliant match of scholarship and investigative journalism." Jason Berry, Chicago Tribune Review:"Barry clearly traces and analyzes how the changes produced by the flood in the lower South came into conflict and ultimately destroyed the old planter aristocracy...and foreshadowed federal government intervention in the region's social and economic life during the New Deal." Library Journal Review:"[I]mplicates both the Mississippi River and the South in a deeper, darker side of the American experience....[The book reminds] us that Americans are just beginning to comprehend the power of their geography." John Opie, Mississippi Quarterly About the AuthorJohn M. Barry is the author of The Ambition and the Power coauthor of The Transformed Cell, and a frequent contributor to national magazines. He lives in New Orleans and Washington, D.C. What Our Readers Are SayingAdd a comment for a chance to win!
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