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September 20, 2008
Natural Disasters Past and Present
As Ike was heading toward Galveston I listened to a different kind of disaster history - John Barry's Rising Tide: The Great Mississippi Flood of 1927 and How It Changed America (link to the Audible abridged version).
Barry keeps two things going on through the book - the enormous permanence of the Mississippi River and the incidental fact of the 1927 flood. I've seen the Mississippi, after all, and know how big it is, but I had never really understood what that means. That, for instance, the river bed is at sea level already at Vicksburg. In other words, the water on the bottom at Vicksburg has no particular reason to GO anywhere - so the flow on the upper levels produces turbulence. That's why the currents are so crazy on the Mississippi.
Barry traces the attempts to control the river back to the first French levees, but he's really interesting in the 19th Century engineers, because it was their systems that finally failed in 1927. He gets in lots of detail, but so fluently that I never felt swamped by it. Mississippians come of much better than the enormously selfish power brokers of New Orleans in the treatment of the flood and the aftermath; once again I wondered why we keep rescuing New Orleans. Pretty place, I know, but really.
The aftermath - recovery might be too kind - of the flood changed America, too. The enormous government intervention catapulted Herbert Hoover to the Republican ticket for 1928, despite a really unsuccessful relief effort. FEMA has a genealogy. The enormous economic ruin of the flood also accelerated the emigration of Southern Blacks to the North. Barry does an excellent job explaining the peculiar paternalistic system exemplified by Leroy Percy in Greenville, MS, and how the flood stopped it dead. William Alexander Percy, author of Lanterns on the Levee, comes off considerably less well; I'm going to have to reread Lanterns - it's been a long time. I have to suppose that Walker Percy at least gets a passing mention in the book version, but he fell before the needs of abridgment in the audio version.
My verdict: interesting and well-told, but I wouldn't pick up the book to see what was left out in the abridgment. Really, the only bad thing was the title. Why "rising tide" if it's about a RIVER? What was he thinking?
By the way, the water's rising now. Go look.
Rising Tide from Amazon.
Posted by CrankyProfessor at September 20, 2008 9:06 AM