Life Between the Levees

Life Between the Levees PDF Author: Melody Golding
Publisher: Univ. Press of Mississippi
ISBN: 1496822854
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 633

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Book Description
Winner of the Donald T. Wright Award from the the Herman T. Pott National Inland Waterways Library, a special collection of the St. Louis Mercantile Library Life Between the Levees is a chronicle of first-person reflections and folklore from pilots who have dedicated their lives to the river. The stories are as diverse as the storytellers themselves, and the volume is full of drama, suspense, and a way of life a “landlubber” could never imagine. Although waterways and ports in the Mississippi corridor move billions of dollars of products throughout the US and foreign markets, in today's world those who live and work on land have little knowledge of the river and the people who work there. In ten years of interviewing, Melody Golding collected over one hundred personal narratives from men and women who worked and lived on “brown water,” our inland waterways. As photographer, she has taken thousands of photos, of which 130 are included, of the people and boats, and the rivers where they spend their time. The book spans generations of river life—the oldest pilot was born in 1917 and the youngest in 1987—and includes stories from the 1920s to today. The stories begin with the pilots who were “broke in” by early steamboat pilots who were on the river as far back as the late 1800s. The early pilots in this book witnessed the transition from steamboat to diesel boat, while the youngest grew up in the era of GPS and twenty-first-century technology. Among many topics, the pilots reflect movingly on the time spent away from home because of their career, a universal reality for all mariners. As many pilots say when they talk about the river, “I hate her when I’m with her, and I miss her when I’m gone.”

Life Between the Levees

Life Between the Levees PDF Author: Melody Golding
Publisher: Univ. Press of Mississippi
ISBN: 1496822854
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 633

Get Book Here

Book Description
Winner of the Donald T. Wright Award from the the Herman T. Pott National Inland Waterways Library, a special collection of the St. Louis Mercantile Library Life Between the Levees is a chronicle of first-person reflections and folklore from pilots who have dedicated their lives to the river. The stories are as diverse as the storytellers themselves, and the volume is full of drama, suspense, and a way of life a “landlubber” could never imagine. Although waterways and ports in the Mississippi corridor move billions of dollars of products throughout the US and foreign markets, in today's world those who live and work on land have little knowledge of the river and the people who work there. In ten years of interviewing, Melody Golding collected over one hundred personal narratives from men and women who worked and lived on “brown water,” our inland waterways. As photographer, she has taken thousands of photos, of which 130 are included, of the people and boats, and the rivers where they spend their time. The book spans generations of river life—the oldest pilot was born in 1917 and the youngest in 1987—and includes stories from the 1920s to today. The stories begin with the pilots who were “broke in” by early steamboat pilots who were on the river as far back as the late 1800s. The early pilots in this book witnessed the transition from steamboat to diesel boat, while the youngest grew up in the era of GPS and twenty-first-century technology. Among many topics, the pilots reflect movingly on the time spent away from home because of their career, a universal reality for all mariners. As many pilots say when they talk about the river, “I hate her when I’m with her, and I miss her when I’m gone.”

Life Between the Levees

Life Between the Levees PDF Author: Melody Golding
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781496822864
Category : Inland navigation
Languages : en
Pages :

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Book Description
"'Life Between the Levees' is a chronicle of first person reflections and folklore from pilots who have dedicated their lives to the river. The stories are as diverse as the storytellers themselves, and the volume is full of drama, suspense, and a way of life a 'landlubber' could never imagine. Although waterways and ports in the Mississippi corridor move billions of dollars of products throughout the US and foreign markets, in today's world those who live and work on land have little knowledge of the river and the people who work there. In ten years of interviewing, Melody Golding collected over one hundred personal narratives from men and women who worked and lived on 'brown water,' our inland waterways. As photographer, she has taken thousands of photos, of which 130 are included, of the people and boats, and the rivers where they spend their time. The book spans generations of river life--the oldest pilot was born in 1917 and the youngest in 1987--and includes stories from the 1920's to today. The stories begin with the pilots who were 'broke in' by early steamboat pilots who were on the river as far back as the late 1800's. The early pilots in this book witnessed the transition from steamboat to diesel boat while the youngest grew up in the era of GPS and twenty-first-century technology. Among many topics, the pilots reflect movingly on the time spent away from home because of their career, a universal reality for all mariners. As many pilots say when they talk about the river, 'I hate her when I'm with her, and I miss her when I'm gone.'"--Provided by publisher.

Not Just the Levees Broke

Not Just the Levees Broke PDF Author: Phyllis Montana-Leblanc
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 141656618X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 245

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Book Description
Called "one of the rawest specimens of classic Nawlins spitfire you'll ever find" by Newsweek, and featured in Spike Lee's HBO documentary When the Levees Broke, Phyllis Montana-Leblanc gives an astounding and poignant account of how she and her husband lived through one of our nation's worst disasters, and continue to put their lives back together. New Orleans Hurricane Katrina survivor Phyllis Leblanc reveals moment by moment the impending doom she and her family experienced during one of the greatest disasters in contemporary American history. The initial weather forecast, the public warnings from officials, and then the increasingly devastating developments -- the winds and rain, the rising waters -- Not Just the Levees Broke begs the question, What would you do in a life-and-death situation with your family and neighbors facing the ultimate test of character? Not Just the Levees Broke is a portrayal of the human spirit at its best -- the generosity of family, neighbors, and strangers; the depth of love that one can hold for another; the power to help and heal others.

They Called Us River Rats

They Called Us River Rats PDF Author: Macon Fry
Publisher: Univ. Press of Mississippi
ISBN: 1496833090
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 230

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Book Description
They Called Us River Rats: The Last Batture Settlement of New Orleans is the previously untold story of perhaps the oldest outsider settlement in America, an invisible community on the annually flooded shores of the Mississippi River. This community exists in the place between the normal high and low water line of the Mississippi River, a zone known in Louisiana as the batture. For the better part of two centuries, batture dwellers such as Macon Fry have raised shantyboats on stilts, built water-adapted homes, foraged, fished, and survived using the skills a river teaches. Until now the stories of this way of life have existed only in the memories of those who have lived here. Beginning in 2000, Fry set about recording the stories of all the old batture dwellers he could find: maritime workers, willow furniture makers, fishermen, artists, and river shrimpers. Along the way, Fry uncovered fascinating tales of fortune tellers, faith healers, and wild bird trappers who defiantly lived on the river. They Called Us River Rats also explores the troubled relationship between people inside the levees, the often-reviled batture folks, and the river itself. It traces the struggle between batture folks and city authorities, the commercial interests that claimed the river, and Louisiana’s most powerful politicians. These conflicts have ended in legal battles, displacement, incarceration, and even lynching. Today Fry is among the senior generation of “River Rats” living in a vestigial colony of twelve “camps” on New Orleans’s river batture, a fragment of a settlement that once stretched nearly six miles and numbered hundreds of homes. It is the last riparian settlement on the Lower Mississippi and a contrarian, independent life outside urban zoning, planning, and flood protection. This book is for everyone who ever felt the pull of the Mississippi River or saw its towering levees and wondered who could live on the other side.

Words Whispered in Water

Words Whispered in Water PDF Author: Sandy Rosenthal
Publisher: Mango Media Inc.
ISBN: 1642503282
Category : Nature
Languages : en
Pages : 278

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Book Description
“Anyone who is interested in Hurricane Katrina, and in America’s failing infrastructure, will want to read this book . . . a fast-paced narrative.” —Scott G. Knowles, Drexel University 2020 Nautilus Silver Winner In the aftermath of one of the worst disasters in US history, Words Whispered in Water tells the story of one woman’s fight, against all odds, to expose a mammoth federal agency—and win. In 2005, the entire world watched as a major US city was nearly wiped off the map. The levees ruptured and New Orleans drowned. But while newscasters attributed the New Orleans flood to “natural catastrophes” and other types of disasters, citizen investigator Sandy Rosenthal set out to expose the true culprit and compel the media and government to tell the truth. This is her story. When the protective steel flood-walls broke, the Army Corps of Engineers—with cooperation from big media—turned the blame elsewhere. In the chaotic aftermath, Rosenthal heroically exposes the federal agency’s egregious design errors and changes the narrative surrounding the New Orleans flood. This engaging and revealing tale of man versus nature and man versus man is a horror story, a mystery, and David and Goliath story all in one. “Reveals what it takes to hold the powerful to account.” —Publishers Weekly “There are only a few civilians that fight like real warriors. Sandy Rosenthal is one of them.” —Russel L. Honoré, Lieutenant General, United States Army (Ret.)

Lords of the Levee

Lords of the Levee PDF Author: Lloyd Wendt
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780810123205
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
Winner of 2006 Illinois State Historical Society Book Award-Certificate of Excellence In the early twentieth century, John Coughlin and Mike Kenna ruled Chicago's First Ward, the lucrative lakefront territory and nerve center of the city. It was one of the most infamous havens for vice in the entire country, home to gambling palaces with marble floors and mahogany bars, to a mini-city of thugs and prostitutes and down-and-outers, to dives and saloons of every description and a few beyond description. In short, the First was a gold mine. In a city where money talked, it made boisterous Bathhouse John and the laconic Hinky Dink Kenna the most powerful men in town. This classic of Chicago-style journalism traces the careers of these two operators as they rose to the top of the city's political world.

Rising Tide

Rising Tide PDF Author: John M. Barry
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 554

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Book Description
The great Mississippi flood of 1927 and how it changed America.

Down on the Batture

Down on the Batture PDF Author: Oliver A. Houck
Publisher: Univ. Press of Mississippi
ISBN: 1604734620
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 220

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Book Description
The lower Mississippi River winds past the city of New Orleans between enormous levees and a rim of sand, mud, and trees called “the batture.” On this remote and ignored piece of land thrives a humanity unique to the region—ramblers, artists, drinkers, fishers, rabbit hunters, dog walkers, sunset watchers, and refugees from immigration, alimony, and other aspects of modern life. Author Oliver A. Houck has frequented this place for the past twenty-five years. Down on the Batture describes a life, pastoral, at times marginal, but remarkably fecund and surprising. From this place he meditates on Louisiana, the state of the waterway, and its larger environs. He describes all the actors who have played lead roles on the edge of the mightiest river of the continent, and includes in his narrative plantations, pollution, murder, land grabs, keelboat brawlers, slave rebellions, the Corps of Engineers, and the oil industry. Houck draws from his experience in New Orleans since the early 1970s in the practice and teaching of law. He has been a player in many of the issues he describes, although he does not undertake to argue them here. Instead, story by story, he uses the batture to explore the forces that have shaped and spell out the future of the region. The picture emerges of a place that—for all its tangle of undergrowth, drifting humanity, shifting dimensions in the rise and fall of floodwater—provides respite and sanctuary for values that are original to America and ever at risk from the homogenizing forces of civilization.

The Ripple Effect

The Ripple Effect PDF Author: Alex Prud'homme
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 9781439168493
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 448

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Book Description
AS ALEX PRUD’HOMME and his great-aunt Julia Child were completing their collaboration on her memoir, My Life in France, they began to talk about the French obsession with bottled water, which had finally spread to America. From this spark of interest, Prud’homme began what would become an ambitious quest to understand the evolving story of freshwater. What he found was shocking: as the climate warms and world population grows, demand for water has surged, but supplies of freshwater are static or dropping, and new threats to water quality appear every day. The Ripple Effect is Prud’homme’s vivid and engaging inquiry into the fate of freshwater in the twenty-first century. The questions he sought to answer were urgent: Will there be enough water to satisfy demand? What are the threats to its quality? What is the state of our water infrastructure—both the pipes that bring us freshwater and the levees that keep it out? How secure is our water supply from natural disasters and terrorist attacks? Can we create new sources for our water supply through scientific innovation? Is water a right like air or a commodity like oil—and who should control the tap? Will the wars of the twenty-first century be fought over water? Like Daniel Yergin’s classic The Prize: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money & Power, Prud’homme’s The Ripple Effect is a masterwork of investigation and dramatic narrative. With striking instincts for a revelatory story, Prud’homme introduces readers to an array of colorful, obsessive, brilliant—and sometimes shadowy—characters through whom these issues come alive. Prud’homme traversed the country, and he takes readers into the heart of the daily dramas that will determine the future of this essential resource—from the alleged murder of a water scientist in a New Jersey purification plant, to the epic confrontation between salmon fishermen and copper miners in Alaska, to the poisoning of Wisconsin wells, to the epidemic of intersex fish in the Chesapeake Bay, to the wars over fracking for natural gas. Michael Pollan has changed the way we think about the food we eat; Alex Prud’homme will change the way we think about the water we drink. Informative and provocative, The Ripple Effect is a major achievement.

Levee

Levee PDF Author: Paul Otremba
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781945588419
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 128

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Book Description
Poems that balance beauty and irony in their interrogation of urgency versus importance.