Ginnie's review
Rising Tide: The Great Mississippi Flood of 1927 and How It Changed America by John M. Barry
John Berry hails from New Orleans and I kept seeing his byline after Katrina. PBS presented a documentary about the 1927 flood based largely on this book. The horrors and anger about Katrina were still fresh in my mind and I hunted this book up to read. Wonderful.
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...more
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...more
