Rising Tide; The Great Mississippi Flood of 1927 and How It Changed America by Barry, John M - 1997

New York, NY: Simon and Schuster, 1997. First Printing [Stated]. Hardcover. Very good/Very good. 524, [2] pages. Illustrations. Map. Notes. Bibliography. Acknowledgments and Methodology. Index. Inscribed and dated on the front free endpaper by the author. Inscription reads: To John, Don't let them wash you away. John M. Barry, 5/10/97, New Orleans. John M. Barry (b. 1947[) is an American author and historian who has written books on the Great Mississippi Flood of 1927, the influenza pandemic of 1918, and the development of the modern form of the ideas of separation of church and state and individual liberty. He is Distinguished Scholar and adjunct faculty at Tulane University. Barry's 1997 book Rising Tide: The Great Mississippi Flood of 1927 and How It Changed America appeared on the New York Times Best Seller list and won the 1998 Francis Parkman Prize from the Society of American Historians for the year's best book on American history. 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. The flood transformed part of the nation, and had a major cultural and political impact on the rest. Derived from a Kirkus review: A devastating flood is both the protagonist and the backdrop of this brilliantly narrated epic story of the misuse of engineering in thrall to politics. Over thousands of years of periodic floods, the Mississippi River deposited millions of acres of rich alluvial soil. Then, in the aftermath of the Civil War, farmers (and politicians) began demanding that the river be contained, so they could reap the soil's wealth. Barry describes how the supremely confident engineers of 19th-century America jumped cockily to the challenge, their attitude typified by James Buchanan Eads, who said in 1874 that he believed man was now ``capable of curbing, controlling and directing the Mississippi, according to his pleasure.'' By the 1920s engineers could brag that they had accomplished what Eads had promised. Stretches of the river were lined with massive levees 30 feet high and 188 feet wide at their base. But then, in 1927, came a flood of almost biblical proportions, and people paid for the engineers' hubris. The flood caused hundreds of deaths, hundreds of thousands of refugees, hundreds of millions in damages-and, Barry argues, the destruction of a way of life, as black sharecroppers fled north for good. Barry's narrative features outsized characters: engineers like Eads; plantation owners like LeRoy Percy, who created an almost feudal Mississippi sharecropping empire; and assorted members of New Orleans's elite, so powerful that they saved their city's bond rating by diverting the flood to their less politically connected neighbors. A fascinating, cautionary tale of humans versus nature that suffers only in its abrupt ending: Barry doesn't establish whether the flood offered more than a temporary setback to overconfident engineers and short-sighted business leaders.