|
Review by James Neal Webb
In the spring of 1927, something terrible and wonderful and tragic happened to America: a great flood inundated the Mississippi Valley. The broad brown river that splits this country in half overran its banks, encountered the levees constructed to contain it, shrugged its shoulders and smashed through them -- God and nature swatting at the gnat of man's hubris. In the wake of its receding waters, the nation was irrevocably changed. African American farmers, unable to till their mud-covered fields, migrated north and west in unprecedented numbers. A federal government long accustomed -- and expected -- to keep its hands out of the people's affairs found itself providing relief on a massive scale, taking the first steps of a long road leading to today's welfare state. A single event forever changed the culture of the south and of the nation and I had never heard of it.
They say that history is written by the victors, but who does the writing when the history is your own country's? In this case I suppose it was written by the politicians who managed to see success while everywhere around them there was failure, but thank goodness there are people like John M. Barry, who isn't afraid to take a fresh look at our past. Rising Tide is an amazing book, and not just because it brings an unseen facet of the American experience into the daylight. What is truly staggering is the width and depth Barry brings to his subject -- Mississippian, if you will.
Barry is remarkably composed when relating the injustices average people endured -- he has a languid, southern style of prose, perhaps as a result of his New Orleans address. He also maintains a residence in Washington, DC, and he pulls no punches there either. From the soulless machinations of Capitol Hill politicians seeing nothing but their own gain in the crisis to the ruthless inbred society bankers of Louisiana, who deliberately and unnecessarily destroyed the lives of thousands of people, Barry is as relentless as a schoolmaster in drumming in his lesson.
Rising Tide is a pithy book, full of detail and good writing. Stretching from the headwaters of the first explorers to the mouth of the 1927 flood, it's a lot like a trip down Ol' Man River himself -- long, full of twists and turns, but well worth the journey.
©1997, ProMotion, inc.
Support your