The End of the River
Written by Simon Winchester
Narrated by Simon Winchester
4.5/5
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About this audiobook
When it comes to climate-change-inspired threats, it is rising sea levels we hear most about. But if the oceans are, as Herman Melville put it, “the tide-beating heart of the earth,” rivers are its circulatory system. In the United States, there is no river more storied, symbolic, and vital than the Mississippi, and none, to use Mark Twain’s word, more lawless. The struggle to control it has been going on nearly as long as there has been human civilization on its banks, and the attendant drama and dangers have been memorialized by many writers, among them Twain and, in his seminal 1987 New Yorker account, John McPhee. Now Simon Winchester, the consummate, critically acclaimed storyteller and bestselling author of Atlantic and The Professor and the Madman, turns his eye to what could well be the height of the battle, one increasingly doomed by man’s interference.
The most fateful instance of this interference was accomplished by an inventor and steamboat captain, Henry Miller Shreve, in the nineteenth century. In vivid detail, Winchester re-creates the smashing and digging and the great man- and steam power that Shreve wielded to clear the river of snags and logjams and, in order to shorten the passage to New Orleans, carve an entirely new channel for it. What no one foresaw was that his celebrated shortcut, Shreve’s Cut, would form a sloping chute to an adjacent river, the Atchafalaya, and, aided by gravity and shifting weather patterns, increasingly tempt the waters of the Mississippi in its direction. Resisting this trend with ever more ingenious methods (and ever more expense) began just after, first with a system of levees, then with added spillways, and, finally, with the conception and construction of a floodgate system, the Old River Control Structure, still in place today. And the stakes are high: If—many say when—the Atchafalaya captures the Mississippi’s stream, it will be the end of life as it’s currently known in the American South. The great cities of Louisiana—New Orleans and Baton Rouge—would be rendered fetid swamps; entire sections of the American infrastructure, from pipelines to electricity and water supply, would collapse. Homes would be displaced and livelihoods, if not lives, would be lost.
Deftly combining the hydrological and the historical, Winchester tours the challenges that upped the ante on the Mississippi River Commission’s duty to protect the watershed and its inhabitants: the upheavals that came in the form of the Great Flood of 1927, one of the most destructive natural disasters of all time, displacing more people than almost any event in American history, and the record-breaking inundations of 1937 and 1973. He pays tribute to the Army Corps of Engineers, for their Herculean efforts to keep the river on its current track, and to one civilian, Albert Einstein’s son Hans Albert Einstein, a hydraulic engineer and one of the main architects of the mighty control structure that continues to divide the Mississippi from the Atchafalaya. But how long can it hold in a time when extremes of weather are the norm, when storms come faster and more furiously, sending sediment-loaded water pounding against the floodgates—events that not only pit man against nature but, given that we cannot always agree which causes and correctives to pursue, man against man?
In this elegant synthesis of past and present, the exigencies of the natural world and the human, Winchester offers an engrossing cautionary tale that readers cannot afford to ignore. It is a call to arms that asks whether accepting defeat—letting nature take its course—may be the only way to win.
Simon Winchester
Simon Winchester is the bestselling author of Atlantic, The Man Who Loved China, A Crack in the Edge of the World, Krakatoa, The Map That Changed the World, The Surgeon of Crowthorne (The Professor and the Madman), The Fracture Zone, Outposts and Korea, among many other titles. In 2006 he was awarded the OBE. He lives in western Massachusetts and New York City.
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Reviews for The End of the River
151 ratings12 reviews
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Simon Winchester somehow manages to make everything he writes about interesting. Having read a couple of his books already, I picked this one up with a sense of foreboding that a book entirely about a river might not be quite as riveting. How wrong I was!. This was a fascinating read, and I recommend that every science teacher in America (and anywhere else where nationalism and human hubris reign supreme) incorporate components of it into their curriculum. Thanks, Mr Winchester!
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5It is an important topic about Flood Control. It is a subject that is often overlooked.
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5The use of English and the jingling words make this an adventure you will want to have.
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Outstanding, concise walk thru of the history and implications of our ongoing attempts to manage this mighty river contrary to its nature.
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5A beautifully written and poetic history of America’s most important river. Mr. Winchester’s precise and deliberate prose gives the river (and all it represents) the reverence it deserves. I lived near this river for years and frankly his account is spot-on, even from a local’s POV.
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5It was really informative and entertaining.. I live in Memphis TN, and I am very interested in the Mississippi River.
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Riveting story of man vs nature that was unknown to me
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5What happens when commercial interests drive major landscape transformations! We should hear more about this kind of "lesson learned", or not learned, and the enormous consequences. There are good reasons for environmental impact studies being conducted long before before the excavators start up.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5This was an interesting history of the Mississippi River and how it was sustained over the years
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Interesting but it is spoiled by the sneers at US.
1 person found this helpful
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Some interesting info that I didn't know. Climate change delirium detracts from the story.
1 person found this helpful
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Another wonderful explication of man made structure, it's history, and it's implications. I found it necessary to look at the Wikipedia article on the subject and other sources online, in order to really understand the physical relationships between the different components. The photos available on those sites brought to life Winchester's descriptions.
1 person found this helpful