Rising Tide, John M. Barry
Rising Tide, John M. Barry
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Rising Tide
The Great Mississippi Flood of 1927 and How It Changed America

Author: John M. Barry

Narrator: George Grizzard

Abridged: 4 hr 50 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Published: 05/01/1998

Synopsis

A New York Times Notable Book of the Year, winner of the Southern Book Critics Circle Award and the Lillian Smith Award.

An American epic of science, politics, race, honor, high society, and the Mississippi River, Rising Tide tells the riveting and nearly forgotten story of the Great Mississippi Flood of 1927. The river inundated the homes of almost one million people, helped elect Huey Long governor and made Herbert Hoover president, drove hundreds of thousands of African Americans north, and transformed American society and politics forever.

The flood brought with it a human storm: white and black collided, honor and money collided, regional and national powers collided. New Orleans’s elite used their power to divert the flood to those without political connections, power, or wealth, while causing Black sharecroppers to abandon their land to flee up north. The states were unprepared for this disaster and failed to support the Black community. The racial divides only widened when a white officer killed a Black man for refusing to return to work on levee repairs after a sleepless night of work.

In the powerful prose of Rising Tide, John M. Barry removes any remaining veil that there had been equality in the South. This flood not only left millions of people ruined, but further emphasized the racial inequality that have continued even to this day.

About John M. Barry

John M. Barry is the author of Rising Tide, The Ambition and the Power: A True Story of Washington, and co-author of The Transformed Cell, which has been published in twelve languages. As Washington editor of Dunn's Review, he covered national politics, and he has also written for The New York Times Magazine, Esquire, Newsweek, The Washington Post, and Sports Illustrated. He lives in New Orleans and Washington, D.C.

Reviews

Goodreads review by ALLEN on December 02, 2018

I picked up this book wondering how any author could spend over 400 pages documenting the Mississippi River flooding of 1927. The raging flood came, went away, better levees were built -- right? Well, there's a lot more to it than that. This worthy volume takes the reader from the days of James Buch......more

Goodreads review by Jim on November 13, 2014

Don’t let the title fool you, while the focus of the book is the great 1927 flood (an event overlooked today), this is a book about the Mississippi River and man’s attempt to live with and in some cases tame it. Full of rich descriptions of men and women whose lives were shaped by the river and the......more

Goodreads review by Mark on May 19, 2021

Someone once said that '...unless you know history, every day is like being born yesterday'. In this book, Mr. Barry cleverly weaves multiple threads together into a coherent story of the great flood of 1927. Long ago, we were looking at vacation property in Trempealeau County Wisconsin which overlo......more

Goodreads review by Eric_W on July 17, 2009

This is a fascinating book about the enormous flood that inundated much of the Mississippi basin in 1927. In fact, the flood covered an areas greater than several northeastern states combined. The flood stretched from Illinois to the Gulf of Mexico, and in some places the water was thirty feet deep.......more

Goodreads review by Anthony on May 18, 2011

One day in the mid seventies while driving across the great plains and listening to Don McLean sing American Pie, It was a great time to be in America,most Americans needed little instruction in how they wanted to live. They were optimistic about the future. The black and white days were over. Bye by......more

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