A devastating flood is both the protagonist and the backdrop of this brilliantly narrated epic story of the misuse of engineering in thrall to politics. Over thousands of years of periodic floods, the Mississippi River deposited millions of acres of rich alluvial soil. Then, in the aftermath of the Civil War, farmers (and politicians) began demanding that the river be contained, so they could reap the soil's wealth. Former Dun's Review staffer Barry (The Ambition and the Power, 1989) describes how the supremely confident engineers of 19th-century America jumped cockily to the challenge, their attitude typified by James Buchanan Eads, who said in 1874 that he believed man was now ``capable of curbing, controlling and directing the Mississippi, according to his pleasure.'' By the 1920s engineers could brag that they had accomplished what Eads had promised. Stretches of the river were lined with massive levees 30 feet high and 188 feet wide at their base. But then, in 1927, came a flood of almost biblical proportions, and people paid for the engineers' hubris. The flood caused hundreds of deaths, hundreds of thousands of refugees, hundreds of millions in damages--and, Barry argues, the destruction of a way of life, as black sharecroppers fled north for good. Barry's narrative features outsized characters: engineers like Eads; plantation owners like LeRoy Percy, who created an almost feudal Mississippi sharecropping empire; and assorted members of New Orleans's elite, so powerful that they saved their city's bond rating by diverting the flood to their less politically connected neighbors. A fascinating, cautionary tale of humans versus nature that suffers only in its abrupt ending: Barry doesn't establish whether the flood offered more than a temporary setback to overconfident engineers and short-sighted business leaders. He barely mentions the devastating flood of 1993 or the renewed debates it engendered about controlling the Mississippi. Perhaps he's saving that story for a sequel. (photos, not seen) (Book-of-the-Month Club/History Book Club alternate selection)

Journalist Barry (The Transformed Cell, LJ 9/1/92) considers the consequences of our greatest natural disaster, leaving 1000 dead and 30 feet of water over land from Missouri to the sea. A 14-city author tour includes several spots in the flood zone. (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

The worst natural disaster in U.S. history, the Mississippi River flood of 1927, which killed more than 1000 people and left 900,000 homeless from Cairo, Ill., to New Orleans, had a far-reaching impact on American society, as revealed in this gripping grassroots epic, redolent with gothic passions of the Old South. The flood shattered the myth of a quasifeudal bond between Delta blacks and the Southern aristocracy. African American flood victims were the principal occupants of squalid Red Cross refugee camps rife with profiteering, pellagra and murders and beatings of blacks by white policemen and civilians. Barry reports that black refugees were given just enough food to avoid starvation, were denied federal reparation through legalistic maneuvers and were compelled by gun-wielding National Guardsmen to work on dangerous levees. The flood triggered an exodus of Southern blacks to Chicago and Los Angeles, among other cities. The cataclysm also marked a watershed, the author persuasively argues, because although the Coolidge administration did virtually nothing to help flood victims recover economically, a public outcry shifted U.S. opinion toward favoring a more activist federal government. The flood made Herbert Hoover, Coolidge's commerce secretary, a national hero, solidifying his presidential ambitions after he headed a special federal rescue effort to handle the emergency. An extraordinary tale of greed, power politics, racial conflict and bureaucratic incompetence, Barry's saga begins in the 1870s as two influential engineers‘James Eads, who built a Mississippi-spanning bridge in St. Louis, and army surveyor Andrew Humphreys‘battle over how to contain the wild, erratic river. The focus then shifts to Mississippi's powerful Percy family‘to railroad magnate W.A. Percy, pioneer of the sharecropping system; to his son LeRoy, banker, plantation owner, senator, who protected blacks against demagogues and the Ku Klux Klan; to poet and lawyer Will (LeRoy's son), ineffectual head of a flood relief committee; and to novelist Walker Percy, Will's blood cousin and adopted son. A cast of power-hungry villains and crusading reformist heroes rounds out this momentous chronicle, which revises our understanding of the shaping of modern America. Photos. BOMC and History Book Club alternate. (Apr.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

The devastating Mississippi flood of 1927 certainly wrought changes in the U.S. on many levels: demographic (more than 1,000 died, over 900,000 were left homeless, and millions of African Americans migrated North); political (Huey Long was elected governor and Hoover president); governmental (the flood inspired New Deal^-type policies as the federal government moved to stabilize the diaster); and societal (the plantation aristocracy was wiped out). Barry has fashioned an epic from this dramatic historic incident, beginning with the two egomanical engineers, James Buchanan Eads and Andrew Atkinson Humphreys, whose personal conflict over the river muddied, indeed, the system to control it, a problem which still exists. Moving on to the aristocratic family of Senator LeRoy Percy and his battle to control the flood, Barry gives the story depth and frames its multiple effects. And then there is the flood itself and the continuation of power struggles: "Whites liked to think a flood fight represented the best of the community . . . it simply reflected the nature of power." An informative work, interestingly told. --Bonnie Smothers