Publisher's Weekly Review
Using vivid explanations of key literary and musical works complemented by contemporary illustrations, Parrish (American Curiosity), professor in the Department of English Language and Literature and the Program in the Environment at the University of Michigan, successfully demonstrates that the Great Mississippi Flood of 1927 left a lasting, modernizing cultural imprint. Rather than recreate the flood's geographic or chronological progress, Parrish details the disaster's aftermath, charting its evolution from a sad but unifying event into one that recalled antebellum divisiveness and man-made environmental destruction. The flood covered seven (mostly Southern) states, inspiring "Vaudeville fund-raiser acts" as well as unprecedented private donations. The reality for the affected included segregated refugee camps and other horrors described in Richard Wright's fictionalized treatments of "Jim Crow environmental disasters." Government officials boasted about their extensive-and failing-levee system from afar, but Bessie Smith's mournful "Backwater Blues" and Faulkner's flood novels, so evocatively documented here, encapsulated the human cost while irrevocably changing music and literature. A thoughtful comparison of 1927's events to 2005's Hurricane Katrina aftermath highlights continuing issues concerning the manipulation of natural flood controls and its effect on impoverished, low-lying neighborhoods. Throughout, Parrish successfully and eloquently captures the sense of humanity and personal loss among the million refugees whose experiences gave rise to artistic efforts and environmental issues that continue to resonate. Maps & illus. (Jan.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Kirkus Review
A scholar's cross-disciplinary look back at the little-remembered greatest natural disaster in American history.Even as Charles Lindbergh took off on his historic solo crossing of the Atlantic, a triumph of modernity, Commerce Secretary Herbert Hoover, appointed by President Calvin Coolidge to manage disaster relief, ordered the evacuation of 35,000 people from a Louisiana town, one small piece of the devastation wrought by the Mississippi superflood of 1927. Although Parrish (English/Univ. of Michigan.; American Curiosity: Cultures of Natural History in the Colonial British Atlantic World, 2006, etc.) sketches out the scope of this catastrophe, she's less interested in a granular account of the slow-moving, long-lasting flood than in exploring how such a disaster acquires meaning. Through multiple lensessociological, ecological, cultural, and aestheticshe focuses on the dark side of modernity, the ominous portents of the future accompanying the deluge: the man-made contributionsclear-cutting, industrial farming, faulty levee designto the flood's magnitude; the harsh economics and the even more severe prejudice that left African-Americans most vulnerable to the flood's depredations and least helped by the federal "relief machine"; the unprecedented communications apparatusthe newly nationalized radio medium, the pervasive white and black pressreporting the unfolding crisis, making it a collective rather than merely private experience; and the contemporaneous representations and interpretations of the disaster by popular entertainers. Too often hobbled by academic locutions and a specialist's vocabulary, Parrish's ambitious, dense, deeply researched narrative nevertheless rewards dedicated general readers. It requires no doctorate to appreciate her rendering of the remarkable back story to Bessie Smith's "Backwater Blues"; her insightful discussion of the trauma's conversion into enduring works of literary fiction by William Faulkner, Richard Wright, and Zora Neale Hurston; her analysis of the persistent North/South hostility that complicated relief efforts; and her survey of 1927's vaudeville scene, from the subversive African-American stars Miller and Lyles to the high-profile, widely influential, and, in the author's telling, somewhat problematic Will Rogers. As a cubist might, Parrish paints a multifaceted portrait of catastrophe: sometimes puzzling, often surprising, and wholly original. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Choice Review
The nine-month-long Mississippi River flood of 1926-27 was an unnatural event; it was not simply borne of natural extremes. Blaming nature fostered governments' efforts to reestablish pre-flood status quo social conditions, particularly in the southern US. Protecting Jim Crow, maintaining sharecropper exploitation by landed elites, preserving racism-based violence and immoral justice, and sustaining the North-South imperial/colonial postbellum legacies constituted sanctioned disaster relief. Parrish (English, Michigan) artfully examines the cultural hegemony of "natural-disaster" thinking and unveils the sources of an environmentally enlightened "man-made-disaster" perspective. Critical perspectives emerging in the 1920s reveal the "up-stream" sources of risk, hazard, and vulnerability: land management in Mississippi headwater regions, exploitation of the human and natural resources of the South by echelons of white managers, laws that serve only the wealthy and powerful and debilitate bottom-land occupants. Parrish's analyses of the African American press, Bessie Smith's blues requiems, vaudevillian disaster-relief performances, and William Faulkner's and Richard Wright's modernist fictions reason that the uneven distribution of the disaster's impacts stemmed from the engineering mentality behind the system, driving manifest destiny--a mentality not shared by the victims, and from which the country continues to suffer. Summing Up: Recommended. All academic levels/libraries. --John P. Tiefenbacher, Texas State University