For anyone who ever wondered what a levee was!
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I read this in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina... I'd been listening to the Randy Newman song "Louisiana 1927" and wanted to know more about the events the song referred to. Anyone with an interest in American history and/or geography should give this a go, and don't be deterred by all the chapters about engineering. I know nothing about physics or engineering, but Mr Barry explains the whole levees vs cut-offs debate so well that I understood it all. It's as much about the society of the Deep South as it is about the river, and while Katrina was a different kind of weather disaster, you will still note resonances - who bears the brunt, who survives stronger. John Barry writes beautifully though stylistically he occasionally falls back on the old thriller tradition of cliffhangers... I also wondered whether the row over how to control the Mississippi was really as character-driven as he suggests. Being a music fan, I also hoped for more on the role of the 1927 floods in the development of Delta blues, but then why should I expect the author to be an expert on the blues as well as engineering systems and social structures in New Orleans? There are other books on that subject, so it's not really a criticism.
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Fascinating panoramic story
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For those of us who only know the United States from history, movies and occasional visits, this book succeeds wonderfully well in capturing the epic scale on which so many events seem to happen in America. I did see the Mississippi river once, back in 1983, and this book brought back vivid memories of what an extraordinary force of nature it is. The book also evoked happy memories of a few days spent in New Orleans. As a work of history, the book could perhaps have been edited a little more tightly, and I agree with one or two other reviewers who have suggested that it fails to convey all the subtleties of New Orleans and Delta life in the 1920s. But it is a great story, and I think Barry is justified in devoting a lot of space early on to the question of how 19th-century engineers grappled with bringing the river under control.
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an excellent read about the most southern place in the world
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Barry's book was interesting, factual, and informative. It was also a pleasure to read. Inferences that this epic event lead to dramatic changes in American politics are plausible. This book is a must read for Southerners, Mississippians, and especially we fortunate few native Deltans.
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without a doubt one of the very best books I have ever read
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I probably wouldn't have reviewed this book were it not for the idiot review and rating from the reader in Bethesda, Md, which got me upset. This is a truly great book. I'm hardly the only person who thinks so. Read the other customer comments, or check out the awards the book's won-- many, including the Francis Parkman Prize, given by the Society of American Historians-- an elite group-- as the outstanding history book of the year. To win the Parkman, Rising Tide properly beat out winners of both the National Book Award and the Pulitzer. It's better than those books-- more thorough, better written, and far more original.. So obviously professional historians as well as book critics do not share the views of the person from Bethesda. But enough about awards, which mean nothing anyway. The book itself is an extraordinary (and amazingly well-documented) story that uses a great flood (made almost 1 million homeless, nearly 1% of the total population of the country at the time) as a narrative vehicle to explore the workings of a society, and to show how it changed that society-- everything from presidential politics and the shift of black voters from the Republican to the Democratic Party, to how engineers deal with the river. There are many stories contained in this book, and the author succeeds in weaving them all together. And they are important stories. One, for example, that struck me: it includes a case study of how ego corrupts science, and how as a result millions of people can be held hostage. (This apparently was the one part of the book that even the Bethesda reader liked.) In fact, the Boston Globe review of this book, which alerted me to it (it was another rave review), put it simply and accurately: "This is nothing less than the story of America itself."
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Starts strong, then loses its way
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The first section of this book, a "rippin yarn", recounts the fascinating careers of several 19th century men who made their marks on the Mississippi River. The rest of the book is a hodge-podge of variously intriguing and pointless factors leading up to and flowing from the 1927 flood (Why drag the Taylorites into this?). The author spares no effort to bludgeon the reader into accepting that the flood was one of the watershed events of the era, but it doesn't wash. The characterization of key figures is heavy-handed and simplistic, evoking a class struggle in which the rich and powerful (New Orleans (hiss), the Percy family and Herbert Hoover) were all, ultimately if not sooner, evil, or, worse yet, seeking more power. Also, after excoriating the bureaucracies (especially the Corps of Engineers) that made the flood inevitable, the author provides virtually no information about what has been done to deal with the River in the subsequent 70 years. I might tolerate such failings in a magazine article, but not in a work with pretensions to stand as a history reference work.
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