Glenn H. reviewed on 7/1/2013 + 80 more book reviews

"Rising Tide" is about the lifestyle and political control of the Mississippi aristocrats who lived like royalty in the delta area of Mississippi. After the War to keep the blacks from moving north they found a way to keep blacks on the farm, the landowners particularly the Percy family invented sharecropping. This gave them a chance to make more money from farming and provided the landowners the labor the crops required. They needed blacks for labor and when the blacks finally started to move north they started importing Italians. The Italians didn't respond to the work conditions and the weather they found in the delta. The top soil in the US averaged about 6 inches, but in the soil in the delta it was 10 feet deep making it he richest soil in the world. The land owners didn't even have to use fertilizer for cotton and their cotton was highly resistant to the boil weevil. The beginning of the book starts out with a foundation for the cause of the flood, and the state, federal, and military politics involved. The reader will find out that the amount of rain that fell mainly on the plain was not the only factor which caused the great flood. Historians will be attracted to this book. I enjoyed it.

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