PRODUCT INFORMATION PAGE Rising Tide: The Great Mississippi Flood of 1927 and How It Changed America View and buy for $10.08 on Amazon.com

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Here are some customer reviews of Rising Tide: The Great Mississippi Flood of 1927 and How It Changed America : As a student of American History I was very interested in reading RISING TIDE after reading the review. I found it to be very readible and more than just a history of the flood. It was a history of American during the 20's with good back ground information. The depiction of the treatment of African Americans was well done and important for people to understand. A must read for students of American History I grew up near the Mississippi and you can't spend as much time on or near it as I did without realizing how it drives the day-to-day lives of those around it. It's not just a body of water but a muddy artery that carries life or death. There is finally a book that does it justice. While some might claim that this is a work waylaid by detail, I strongly disagree. That, in fact, is the beauty of this book because all of those details send out tendrils that eventually start meshing about a third of the way in. Once they do, the pace and energy of this epic tale start building. And for me, it started answering a lot of questions I had had since childhood. I remember my father talking about patrolling a section of levee all night in 1927 looking out for Arkansas dynamiters with orders from the sheriff to shoot to kill if any nighttime boatmen didn't answer his challenge. This book gives those stories a reality that is hard to desctibe. I can remember how the river stage was carried at the top right hand corner of the front page of Memphis papers and was relentlessly discussed. This book explains why this was no idle exercise. I cannot recommend this book enough for anyone interested in why a large part of the South was what it was and is what it is. And, for those who think that they have the South of the early 20th century all figured out, prepare to have your beliefs challenged by some of the surprises offered by this book. And isn't that a pretty good definition of a good book? A fabulous story with a brilliant use of interlocking lesser stories on the river, hydro engineering, the Percys of Greenville, the power in New Orleans, and pre-depression era politics. The sections on Herbert Hoover, in dramatic contrast to the rest of the book, are profoundly boring. A few sources cited in the footnotes are missing from the bibliography; several of the tantalizing photo captions have no elaboration in the book; oral history recorded 70 years after the fact that slanders character should be more carefully handled. Barry makes too much of the flood as a major cause of black northward migration (read first part of Nick Lemann's PROMISED LAND for balance) and not enough of the, for some, inevitable claiming of the extreme lower Mississippi by the Atchafalaya (read about it in John McFee's CONTROL OF NATURE). Still, Barry's book is an awesome story based on a staggering amount of research; a present to us from somone who loves to show how much he loves his subjec Like other reviewers here I loved this book. This tale of the great Mississippi River flood of 1927 touches on so much, like the river itself, race relations, leadership both its failure and success; there's even some hubris in here for the classically inclined. Early in the book, Barry writes of the efforts to tame nature - and the courage and folly it took to do so.In a passage late in the book, you could almost hear the blues being created by the flood. The story connects some of the era's nastier scoundrels, like Sen. Bilbo, to the flood and casts a fascinating spotlight on the Percy family of which Walker Percy, the novelist, is a scion. The Percy's out-Faulkner Faulkner. If I were a teacher I would assign it to a class to show them how exciting history can be. RISING TIDE is a brilliant book. The book is nominally about a flood in 1927 that made ONE MILLION people homeless. Yet the book includes everything from a histroy of the development of the engineering profession (built around the story of James Eads, a man more impressive than any Ayn Rand character) and the profession's impact on society to the social forces behind the Ku Klux Klan and Mardi Gras. A stunning narrative succeds in weaving it all together. The flood's repercussions were as big as the disaster itself: it permanently changed southern and presidential politics, redefined race relations in part of the country, and shifted America's population. And, the next time you read a story about a flood you'll know more about how rivers and floods work than whoever wrote it. This book is special, and you will not forget it

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