Overview
In Water and Oil, John Barry traces three great rivers and the struggle to control them: the Missouri, bearing the soil of the Great Plains; the Ohio, moving coal and steel; and the Mississippi, carrying a continent in its currents and building land across seven states, including Louisiana’s Gulf coast. This wrestling with nature involved some of the most consequential projects in American history, bringing development from the Alleghenies to the Rockies to the Gulf. It also set in motion consequences that would ultimately pit Barry against one of the world’s most powerful industries.
The builders of these projects were as large as the projects themselves. Barry brings to life engineer James Eads, oil titan Joseph Cullinan, Theodore Roosevelt, Herbert Hoover, and Franklin Roosevelt. His canvas encompasses the Depression and the racial history of the Mississippi Delta.
The projects fueled prosperity but altered natural processes that created coastal Louisiana; oil and gas compounded those effects by cutting thousands of miles of canals through fragile wetlands. The result: the Gulf devoured two thousand square miles of coastal Louisiana. Land loss continues, threatening New Orleans, coastal communities, and an American economy whose dependence on Louisiana’s coast stretches from Montana to Maine.
After Hurricane Katrina devastated New Orleans, the history Barry had been tracing became his own. Joining the levee board charged with protecting the city and recognizing that land loss magnified the danger, he became the architect of one of the most ambitious environmental lawsuits ever filed, taking on the wealth and political reach of the oil and gas industry to uphold a principle at the core of American law: No one is above it.
With the narrative force and analytical clarity that have made his previous books enduring classics, Barry turns a vast national history into an urgent struggle over the future. Water and Oil is a story about power—how it builds countries and fortunes, reshapes rivers and landscapes, and shields itself from consequence. At its center is a fight to prove that even the most powerful can be held to account.
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