A lavishly illustrated, comprehensive, interdisciplinary study of the natural and human elements that comprise the Upper Connecticut River watershed

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.

The gripping, true-life story of one of the most destructive floods in U.S. history and its effect on one city and its citizens.

A well-crafted tale of secrets and evil lurking under the surface in the Mississippi river town of Pilotville, Louisiana, during the great flood of 1927.

"Ellen Waterston's new book is a slug of juniper air, a breath-taking view of a rough-edged land, as bracing and taut as October morningsùpart celebration, part elegy all love and the wisdom that grows from deep roots in basalt rock. Like Wallace Stegner and Ivan Doig, Waterston writes masterfully about what it meansùwhat it really means -to live in the West."-Kathleen Dean Moore, author of Wild Comfort There is an otherness to the high desert, something momentous and sacred in the purity of the silence. In this compelling collection of personal essays, award winning poet and author Ellen Waterston illuminates the people, places, and landscapes of central Oregon's vast high desert. In Where the Crooked River Rises, Waterston reveals the blessings and challenges of decades spent as a rancher and town resident in a place that has been, and remains, her touchstone and crucible. The high desert is Waterston's teacher, and she describes its lessons with grace and care, inviting readers to look at their own lives through a lens of wide-open spaces, sagebrush and juniper, pumice and rabbit blush.