- Paperback: 528 pages
- Publisher: Simon & Schuster (April 2 1998)
- Language: English
- ISBN-10: 0684840022
- ISBN-13: 978-0684840024
- Product Dimensions: 23.5 x 15.8 x 3.4 cm
- Shipping Weight: 581 g
- Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars See all reviews (44 customer reviews)
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Amazon Bestsellers Rank:
#267,936 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #66 in Books > Science > Earth Sciences > Natural Disasters
- #66 in Books > Outdoors & Nature > Environment > Natural Disasters
- See Complete Table of Contents
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Product Details |
Product Description
From Amazon
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. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
From Library Journal
In the spring of 1927, America witnessed perhaps its greatest natural disaster: a flood that profoundly changed race relations, government, and society in the Mississippi River valley region. Barry (The Transformed Cell, LJ 9/1/92) presents here a fascinating social history of the effects of the massive flood. More than 30 feet of water stood over land inhabited by nearly one million people. Almost 300,000 African Americans were forced to live in refugee camps for months. Many people, both black and white, left the land and never returned. Using an impressive array of primary and secondary sources, 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, accelerated black migration to the North, and foreshadowed federal government intervention in the region's social and economic life during the New Deal. His well-written work supplants Pete Daniel's Deep'n as It Come: The 1927 Mississippi Flood (1977) as the standard work on the subject. Recommended for public and academic libraries.
-?Charles C. Hay III, Eastern Kentucky Univ. Libs., Richmond
Copyright 1997 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
-?Charles C. Hay III, Eastern Kentucky Univ. Libs., Richmond
Copyright 1997 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
Inside This Book
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First Sentence
THE VALLEY of the Mississippi River stretches north into Canada and south to the Gulf of Mexico, east from New York and North Carolina and west to Idaho and New Mexico. Read the first page
Front Cover | Copyright | Table of Contents | Excerpt | Index
THE VALLEY of the Mississippi River stretches north into Canada and south to the Gulf of Mexico, east from New York and North Carolina and west to Idaho and New Mexico. Read the first page
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Concordance
Browse Sample PagesConcordance
Front Cover | Copyright | Table of Contents | Excerpt | Index
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Most helpful customer reviews
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful
5.0 out of 5 stars
Outstanding Read!,
By Grozarks "grmissouri" (St. Louis, Missouri United States) - See all my reviews
This review is from: Rising Tide: The Great Mississippi Flood of 1927 and How It Changed America (Paperback)
"Rising Tide" is a wonderful book and a facinating read!!! The author covers a history or flood control on the Mississippi, which might sound dull but is not, as well as some of the very important characters who shaped the history of this very important river in our history. His story of the Percy family and the powers of New Orleans is equally interesting. The events and stories that lead up to the great event are as interesting as the Great Flood of 1927 itself. This is one of those books that is near impossible to put down!!
5.0 out of 5 stars
Comprehensive well-written history,
By Jenny Hanniver "medieval_student" (Philadelphia, PA, United States) - See all my reviews
This review is from: Rising Tide: The Great Mississippi Flood of 1927 and How It Changed America (Paperback)
This lengthy book can stand alongside Tuchman's STILWELL as one of those rare studies that combine personalities, good intentions, overwhelming events, and political fallout, and I was captivated by every page of it. With the exception of portraying the human tendency to "believe rather than understand," the Ku Klux Klan demagogue leaders, and General Humphreys (whose behavior indicates mental illness) there are few villains in this book except the weather and the inexorable Mississippi River. I found Barry's portrayals of Eads, the Percys, Kemper, the hard-working African-Americans, even the dangerously erratic Humphreys fascinating. Isaac Cline (leading character of another well-written study of a major weather disaster, Larson's ISAAC'S STORM) reappears in this book to the reader's advantage. The author knows how politics works. Without expressing sympathy or holier-than-thou condemnation, he understands the often pathetic motivations of the 1920s Ku Kluxers -- highly relevant to today's anti-intellectual fundamentalist extremism -- and his review of the political repression under Wilson makes me thank God that things haven't yet gone quite that far under our present-day, similarly dimwitted, administration. The author's conclusion, that a single preventable flood radically changed political history, was presented cogently and convincingly. Altogether this is a work of rare excitement and scholarship. Highly recommended.
4.0 out of 5 stars
Fast paced, exciting...,
By A Customer
This review is from: Rising Tide: The Great Mississippi Flood of 1927 and How It Changed America (Paperback)
A joy to read. History that doesn't get bogged down in superfluous detail. Excellent.
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