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Summary: Jay Tolson, editor of The Wilson Quarterly
Review: Who could imagine that so much of the American story could be told through the story of the great flood of 1927--and be told so dramatically? John Barry's masterful account of the last uncontrolled rampage of the Mississippi River shows how a natural disaster can sometimes disclose a society's fragile workings, even while it alters them forever
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Summary: David Levering Lewis, author of W.E.B. Du Bois
Review: John Barry's Rising Tide sweeps his reader along like the Mississippi itself. It is absorbing American history about hubris, nobility, decadence, and race served up in prose that complements the grandeur of the great river
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Summary: Dan T. Carter, author of The Politics of Rage
Review: John Barry's Rising Tide takes us into the heart of one of America's greatest natural disasters, but his compelling account is more than a description of nature's devastation, it is a window into the end of one era and the beginning of another
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Summary: William Ferris, Center for the Study of Southern Culture
Review: Rising Tide is a fascinating tale of the South's greatest natural disaster. John Barry effectively uses the Great Mississippi Flood as a backdrop for the grim drama of class and race relations along the river
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Summary: impressive
Review: I read this book several years ago and it still haunts me. I would give "Rising Tide" a 4.5 star rating were that a choice because there was so much to enjoy in its' scope. I remember a good introduction to the efforts to control the Mighty Mississippi. I remember the plight of Greenville, Mississippi and many other communities along the river. However, I remember the situation in Louisiana most of all. There the City of New Orleans made a deal with some of the lesser populated Cajun parishes to flood their land in order to save the city. The deal had a devastating affect on the Cajuns and was largely forgotten by the city fathers of New Orleans. These vignettes stand out because the author, John Barry, has a reporters sense of weaving vital facts in with human interest stories to give an inside look to an important yet largely forgotten event in American History.Everybody has his or her favorite body of water. For many it's an ocean, for some a lake or a trout stream. For me it has always been the Mississippi River. Ever since I first saw it as a child, I was impressed. Even though I have lived by the confluence of the Missouri and Yellowstone Rivers for the last 22 years, I have not changed my opinion. The vast expanse and power of this river is truly something to behold. "Rising Tide" is worthy of its' subject and that is saying a lot.
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Summary: Comprehensive well-written history
Review: 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.
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Summary: Those who forget the past -- ought to read this.
Review: The great Mississippi Flood of 1927, one of THE greatest disasters in American history, is now largely forgotten despite the social upheavals it caused. What is eerie about "Rising Tide" is the parallels between the events of 1927 and the floods of 1993 and how the lessons of the past follies in flood control have been largely forgotten. Of course the 1993 floods caused no major social upheavals and that is at least as important to the story. At least we've evolved as a society to the point where a small clique of power brokers could never be allowed to deliberately flood a poor parrish to save their own homes. At least, I hope. This is a highly readable and very informative book for history buffs.
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Summary: Mississippi River blues
Review: A combination of Mother Nature and human error and arrogance caused the disaster that flooded thousands of square miles of land in Mississippi, Louisiana, and Arkansas in 1927, when the Mississippi River flooded. Nature provided an excessive amount of water from heavy rains and snow all that winter--flood levels were higher than ever, earlier than ever. But faulty policy (a levee-only approach to flood control), southern arrogance (business interests succeeded in saving New Orleans at the expense of many others who were never compensated for their losses as promised), and, of course, racism (whites tried to "enslave" blacks on the levees to make them work and keep them from migrating north) all contributed to the disaster. Whole counties were under 3 to 20 feet of water, one million people were displaced. The flood affected many things: it swept Hoover into the White House (Coolidge refused to do anything to help the people); it changed peoples' view of what the role of government should be in these kinds of disasters; it destroyed the myth of the white-black patronage system (blacks working the land as sharecroppers in exchange for the "protection" of whites); and it changed the way the great river would be managed (spillways would be built). Barry tells all of this excellently, in the old narrative history style of the great historians of the past, making it interesting at every turn. Highly recommended.
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Summary: one of the best
Review: This is one of the best books I've read in the last decade. It is far, far more than a mere history of the devastating flood; it is at least as much a social history of the times as lived in the South, primarily Mississippi and Louisiana. It reads almost like a novel, and Barry does an excellent job of bringing the various characters to life. He convinced me that the flood truly did change America.
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Summary: Actually, 10 Stars Might be More Appropriate
Review: I read quite a bit, especially non-fiction. Rising Tide is the best book I ever read period. I've learned from many conversations with fellow southern readers that there are others who share this view, and I have not talked to anyone who didn't think the book was great.
At the risk of sounding trite, I must say this is one of those books that truly qualified as one I never wanted to see end.
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