Summer reading.

Suzanne Keen

Suzanne Keen writes frequently for Commonweal and teaches English literature at Washington and Lee University in Lexington, Virginia.

In this season of book-recommending, the titanic power of Oprah Winfrey has rendered some highbrow taste makers a mite peevish. Most of the friendly souls who yearly share their reading lists with us welcome the sight of a paperback fiction best-seller list in which serious literary fiction outnumbers the Grishams and Higgins Clarks. Here and there, however, in the quarterlies and in the academy, I catch the tone of beach house owners in a bad hurricane season: Oprah's blowing us away, again! I'm not with the excited meteorologists on this one, but content to wobble out on the sea wall in a slicker, shouting into the wind: Toni Morrison's Song of Solomon (NAL/Dutton, $5.99, 337 pp.), read by tens and maybe hundreds of thousands of people this year? Hit us again, Oprah!

If Oprah reminds us that "serious" literary fiction can be fun and stimulating enough to be read eagerly by large numbers of Americans, she also endorses books that are readable and engrossing. In that spirit, I proffer the following suggestions.

If you caught "Ivanhoe" on TV recently, you may have felt an impulse to renew your acquaintance with Walter Scott. Old Mortality, which can be found in Penguin and Oxford ($11.95, 616 pp.) paperbacks, or in a used bookstore, makes a great place to start. My husband urges me to tell you to hang in there for the first thirty pages or so--Scott's great war story and study of the character of religious enthusiasm doesn't falter once the action starts. Old Mortality sets the standard for historical fiction in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries: It has gripping adventure, brushes with the famous, and complex characters.

If you especially enjoy historical fiction, I would also recommend two more recent novels, Jane Smiley's The Greenlanders (Fawcett; $14, 608 pp.), and Barry Unsworth's Sacred Hunger (Norton, $12.95, 629 pp.). The novels (about medieval Greenland and the slave trade, respectively) have very little in common except for their compelling accounts of the way humans think about racial otherness. Both conjure up long-gone worlds in their vivid evocation of the details and materials of everyday life: a slave ship, a red dress, a carved spoon. Their elegaic intensity obliterates any of the whiff of the formidable research that must have gone into their composition.

Though it isn't strictly speaking a historical novel, Seamus Deane's wonderful Reading in the Dark (Knopf, $23, 245 pp.) brings a poet's lyrical gifts to the task of capturing a closer historical period, of the Troubles in Northern Ireland. The Booker Prize committee really missed the boat on this short-listed novel, Deane's first full-length work of fiction. Perhaps because it superficially resembles a recent Irish-authored Booker winner, Roddy Doyle's Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha (in both books a little boy discovers imperfectly concealed truths about his family), the committee honored an altogether less impressive book, Graham Swift's Last Orders (Random House, $12, 294 pp.). I can't discuss the plot of Reading in the Dark without spoiling the surprises upon which the novel depends, but many of the lyrical vignettes that make up the story made my hair stand on end. This novel is worth buying in hardcover, if you can't find it in a library.

If I were putting together a reading list with the theme "Family Secrets," I would certainly include not only Seamus Deane's book, but Gloria Naylor's best novel, Mama Day (Random House, $12, 320 pp.). Set mostly on an imaginary island off the coast of South Carolina and Georgia (but belonging to neither state), Mama Day tells the story of the descendents of Sapphira Wade, a slave woman and sorceress. Naylor masterfully creates a raft of memorable characters, and imagines a world with its own history, customs, folkways, charms, and dangers. If you have been following Oprah's reading list, Mama Day makes a stimulating companion to Toni Morrison's Song of Solomon.

To cap off a summer of reading either historical fiction, or novels about family secrets, you might enjoy a book that fits both categories, and which happens to be one of the funniest novels I have read in a long time: Louis de Bernieres's Corelli's Mandolin (Vintage, $13, 437 pp.). The lives of Greek villagers and Italian soldiers during World War II provide the material for excruciating comedy and poignant ironies. This novel may have gone out of print, but I found copies for sale at the amazing internet bookstore, Amazon Books (http:// www.amazon.com). It is also available on audio cassette, and, if you have a commute that wouldn't be rendered life-endangering by paralyzing bouts of laughter, Corelli's Mandolin would make a fine choice for a book on tape.

If the mere thought of starting a novel makes you feel faint with exhaustion and guilty in advance for not finding time to finish it, perhaps a slighter volume would appeal. I thoroughly enjoyed perusing The Poetry of Jane Austen and the Austen Family (University of Iowa Press, $12.95, 124 pp.), edited by David Selwyn. Especially if you have read and re-read the tiny canon of Austen novels, this collection of poems helps to recreate the world of word-play, riddling, charades, and verbal fun in which their author lived. I especially relished the riddles.

Thomas Swick

Thomas Swick is the travel editor of the Sun-Sentinel in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, and the author of the travel memoir Unquiet Days: At Home in Poland.

A collection of pieces gives me the same pleasurable rush of expectation that an all-you-can-eat buffet must give a glutton. It is a mystery to me why publishers hold the form in such low esteem. I still remember my librarian friend coming to the tennis court one late summer afternoon in 1975 and handling with a jeweler's delicacy a newly arrived copy of Cyril Connolly's The Evening Colonnade. The table of contents--"Oxford in Our Twenties," "Farewell to Provence," "Little Magazines"--intrigued me more than the chapters of any novel could. There between the covers of a single volume awaited the elegant workings of a well-traveled mind.

I got a similar thrill recently on seeing Pico Iyer's Tropical Classical: Essays from Several Directions (Knopf, $25, 314 pp.). In books like Video Night in Kathmandu and The Lady and the Monk, Iyer has carved a niche as an astute analyst of the subtle and increasingly frequent interchange between East and West. He is a leading voice in the new school of travel writing that no longer simply describes a place but helps to explain it.

Tropical Classical has the traditional literary collection's miscellany--pulling in travel articles, profiles, book reviews, essays. But it differs slightly in that many of its pieces share a theme, which is the happy intermingling in contemporary literature of two seemingly disparate worlds: the sensual tropics and the more cerebral, or at least more structured, northern climes. Iyer picks three distinct genres--poetry, fiction, essays--and finds in each a modern practitioner--Derek Walcott, Michael Ondaatje, and Richard Rodriguez--who has demonstrated "the ability to season high classical forms with a lyrical beauty drawn from the streets and beaches of their homes."

Many of the reviews in this collection are of writers--Salman Rushdie, Vikram Seth, Romesh Gunesekera--who inhabit this new terrain, which Iyer must be the first to have mapped, if not identified. V.S. Naipaul is not included because, though he wrote eloquently of his childhood in Trinidad, he did so in the studied cadences and syntax of the English canon. But I think he should probably be given some credit as a forerunner; he was, in a sense, the Jackie Robinson to Rushdie's Deion Sanders.

The unrelated pieces are no less interesting-travel essays ranging from Ethiopia to New York (a city, Iyer notes rightly, which one always recollects in black and white) and lengthy profiles, including the most enlightening one I've read of the brilliant and reticent travel writer Norman Lewis. The world of collected pieces is in good hands.

The same unfortunately cannot be said for another of my favorite literary forms, collected letters (though it will be interesting to see who will publish the first e-mail correspondence, and who will bother to read it). The immense pleasure I had last month reading The Correspondence of Shelby Foote & Walker Percy (W.W. Norton, $27.50, 304 pp.) was surely heightened by the knowledge that it was one of the last of its kind. And no collection could better demonstrate what we stand to lose through this demise.

Shelby Foote and Walker Percy became high school friends in Greenville, Mississippi, in the 1930s, and their correspondence began in 1948 when both were starting out on their writing careers (Percy tentatively, Foote boldly).

The first half of the book is all Foote, because he did not begin saving Percy's letters until 1970. But he more than fills the stage--lecturing his friend, advising him (especially on whom to read, mainly Proust), boasting shamelessly: "I've begun my book. It's going to be a great book; I feel ten inches taller than Shakespeare." This at the end of a letter that begins: "Good writers are not wise men, nor men with faith; good writing proceeds from doubt. It was Dostoevsky's doubt that made him great."

Percy is, not surprisingly, more subdued, but just as preoccupied with what he describes in one letter as this "strange business." There is little about family here, or current events, or life itself outside of art, though Percy tells of a book he's planning (Love in the Ruins) that deals "with the decline and fall of the U.S., the country rent almost hopelessly between the rural knotheaded right and the godless alienated left, worse than the Civil War. Of that and the goodness of God, and of the merriness of living quite anonymously in the suburbs, drinking well, cooking out, attending Mass at the usual silo-and-barn, the goodness of Brunswick bowling alleys...."

The meditations and apercus fly across four decades until the last letter from Percy, in 1989, and the address from Foote at his memorial service. And the sadness you feel over the end of this friendship lingers longer than if it had been a construct of fiction.

The one novel that I've especially enjoyed this year is also a collection of sorts, Paul Theroux's My Other Life (Houghton Mifflin, $24.95, 456 pp.). These loosely-linked stories recount, the author has explained, things that could have happened to him, though they also cover a lot that did: the Peace Corps work in Africa, the teaching in Singapore, the travel books, the midlife divorce. But the fact vs. fiction debate becomes irrelevant in the face of Theroux's writing. "Failure," he says at one point, "is a sort of funeral, and a person fleeing a collapsed marriage is both the corpse and the mourner." His is a perpetually interesting voice.

James Duffy

James Duffy is a writer and retired lawyer living in New York City.

Are You Ready to Step Out of Yourself?" the Irish Tourist Board asks in a current promotion. If you would answer yes, but lack either the time or the wherewithal to venture overseas this summer, I can recommend three novels and a memoir by Irish or Irish-American writers that may enable you to step out of yourself, even though you never leave your backyard hammock.

Angela's Ashes (Scribner, $25, 363 pp.), Frank McCourt's memoir of his boyhood, has already been reviewed in these pages [November 8, 1996]. It has been a national best seller (often in first place on the nonfiction list) and has won both a National Book Critics Award and a Pulitzer Prize. As every reader must know by now, the book describes the author's life to age eighteen, beginning in Brooklyn in 1930 and soon shifting to Limerick. The descriptions of life with his ne'er-do-well, drunken father and hapless mother, and of the family's poverty so grim and deep that it is hard even to imagine, are breathtaking. His daring risks with language are distinctively original, though I was reminded of both James Joyce and Tom Wolfe.

Seamus Deane's Reading in the Dark (Knopf, $23, 272 pp.) is also an account of coming of age, this time in Derry, Northern Ireland, in the forties and fifties. Almost certainly autobiographical in part, this memoir is cast as a novel. The theme is not poverty, but a secret of the family of the unnamed narrator involving the death or murder of his uncle Eddie, who may or may not have been a heroic IRA fighter. As all such family secrets eventually do, this one becomes known to all with shattering consequences for the boy narrator and his relatives. Although a first novel, the book was short-listed for the Booker Prize in England last year. Deane, heretofore known as a poet, critic, and editor, now resides in Dublin, though he spends part of each year teaching Irish studies at the University of Notre Dame.

John Banville's The Untouchable (Knopf, $25, 368 pp.) is a fictional memoir of a spy for the Russians modeled, except for his Irishness, on Sir Anthony Blunt. Dying, exposed as a spy and a homosexual at age seventy-two, Victor Maskell attempts to justify his life in a journal ostensibly written for a flee-lance woman journalist who wants to write a book about him. Maskell explores and attempts to explain the deep contradictions of his life: Irish, yet the knighted Keeper of the King's Pictures; simultaneously a confidant of the royal family and a Russian spy; married and the father of two, but also an active homosexual. "Did I call it a double life?" he writes. "Quadruple--quintuple--more like."

The reader is unlikely to come to a satisfying judgment of Maskell, as Banville presents him. And many will quarrel with the mean-spirited caricature of Graham Greene in the character Querell. But what most assuredly should attract the reader is Banville's flowing prose style. That the novel is a model of stylish composition should not come as a surprise, since Banville is a seasoned novelist and the literary editor of the Irish Times.

A lighter read is Maeve Binchy's bestselling Evening Class (Delacorte, $24.95, 420 pp.), a warm and often amusing account of a night course in the Italian language at a rundown Dublin school. The class is taught by a wonderfully sketched eccentric, Nora O'Donoghue, who has returned after twenty-six years spent in Sicily and is known simply as Signora. Binchy manipulates an enormous cast--the highly diverse participants in the course and their relatives and friends--with clever ingenuity. The plot is a marvel, adroitly intertwining the lives of the characters in ways both funny and sad, and the final episode, a class trip to Rome, is a joyride.

These books amply demonstrate the current robust health of Irish letters (a condition also attested to by new works recently published or about to be published by Roddy Doyle, Colm Toibin, and Edna O'Brien, among others). All four have the distinction of being superbly written in that ancient and dead language called English.

Molly Finn

Molly Finn, a free-lance writer, lives in New York City. The location of her country cottage is top-secret.

A strong blast of truth is a bracing antidote to the swamp of evasion, deception, euphemism, and self-serving double talk we find ourselves immersed in so often these days. Such a blast is just what Richard Pollak provides in The Creation of Dr. B (Simon & Schuster, $28, 478 pp.), his penetrating examination of the life and work of Bruno Bettelheim, one of the major liars of recent times. Using lies, exaggerations, and false claims, in combination with a compelling personality and what must have been a degree of charm, Bettelheim created for himself an impressive set of credentials and a reputation as both a wise and humane child psychiatrist who had unprecedented success in treating autistic children and an authority on the Holocaust as well as several other subjects. People in high places and, especially, a gullible and indulgent press bought wholesale all that Bettelheim claimed for himself. The University of Chicago, which sponsored his famous school, never established an oversight committee or questioned his claims of success; the Ford Foundation gave him a very large grant without checking his credentials or the results of his "research." Robert Coles turned him into "a hero for our time" in the pages of the New Republic. And even Commonweal published a piece titled "The Holy Work of Bruno Bettelheim," going so far as to extend his wisdom and expertise even beyond the limits he claimed for himself, to include "poverty and inequality in America."

Bettelheim was not an innocuous force. He used his reputation and authority to strike out at large groups of people, causing serious harm and anguish. He accused Jews of "ghetto thinking," conniving in their own destruction through their passive submission to the Nazis who imprisoned them. His attacks on mothers were famous, particularly mothers of autistic children, whom he likened to SS guards and devouring witches. He accused a public gathering of Jewish students of causing anti-Semitism by their refusal to assimilate. In writing this meticulously researched, entirely persuasive biography, Pollak has not only done a service to truth, but he has brought comfort and vindication to the many people who have suffered at Bettelheim's hands.

Another kind of truth-telling is to be found in Pat Barker's remarkable trilogy about World War I (Regeneration, Plume, $11.95, 251 pp; The Eye in the Door, $10.95, 280 pp; The Ghost Road, Plume, $11.95, 277 pp.). Complex, subtle, shocking, Barker's novels portray this hideous war through the effects it had on a set of fascinating characters, some actual, historic people and some fictional. One volume is set mostly in Craiglockhart War Hospital in Scotland, where psychiatrist William Rivers attempts to bring back to life (and ultimately to return to the trenches) the mute or stuttering, nightmare-ridden, paralyzed, obsessed ghosts of the men (recently boys) who went off to fight a short time before. One of his patients is the poet Siegfried Sassoon, who was declared "mentally unsound" when he publicly refused to continue serving as a British officer. It is Rivers's job to restore Sassoon to "sanity" (a state of mind in which he will wish to return to the trenches), setting off a struggle within each and between the two that results in an at best ambiguous outcome. The poet Wilfred Owen is another of Rivers's patients; in several scenes we see him with Sassoon, working and reworking a rough draft into a finished poem. Owen's death in battle during the final week of the war, always known as a devastating loss, here becomes poignantly emblematic of the ruinous costs of war. The books are written with an almost magical simplicity that manages to be more expressive than any gnashing of teeth or tearing of hair.

I've had fun reading Michael Ondaatje, not just The English Patient (Vintage, $12, 305 pp.) but also its predecessor, In the Skin of a Lion (Vintage, $12, 244 pp.), and the hilarious memoir of his childhood in Ceylon (never referred to as Sri Lanka), Running in the Family (Vintage, $10,207 pp.). Learning about his zany family gives the reader some background, if not an explanation of, Ondaatje's almost maniacal intensity and his fascination with exotic places and professions. It would take considerable space to do real justice to these complicated books. For me a lot of their appeal has to do with their intimate portrayal of extreme conditions: of climate and geography, of devastating physical disability, and of the rigors and suspense demanded by the sapper's art and science (The English Patient), and the breathtaking dangers undergone by workers who are building a bridge (In the Skin of a Lion). The books are vivid--even spellbinding. Forget the movie--it may or it may not be good, but it's something else entirely.

I can't resist mentioning another reading--I should say "reading"--pleasure of this past spring. My husband and I have long been devoted to listening to books on tape as we drive the three hours to and from our country cottage. This year we have watched the spring unfold while listening to David Case read Anthony Powell's A Dance to the Music of Time (University of Chicago Press, 4 volumes, $17.95). You can buy these wry, leisurely accounts of literary, artistic, political, and high-society life in prewar London and read them in the usual way. But if you commute by car or have some other occasion to make long drives, I cannot recommend too highly the uncut, expertly (usually) read offerings of Books on Tape (800-626-3333).

P.S. In case you have not already done so, do read Frank McCourt's Angela's Ashes this summer.

Timothy D. Bates 

Timothy D. Bates, an attorney practicing in Groton, Connecticut, is on the national board of Family Service America.

Nothing makes a better summer read than murder mysteries. Mysteries tend toward the quick read and provide the studied diversion necessary to fill empty nights at the vacation cottage. They also tend not to weigh much, allowing them to fit easily in back packs. And, most important, they offer the consistent illusion--needed for a reassuring vacation--that rationality and perseverance can overcome life's mysteries, particularly death.

In these days of seemingly relative values and constant uncertainty, this last illusion can prove difficult to perpetuate, but the best mystery writers somehow pull it off. In this spirit, let me suggest the following series.

Lawrence Block's "burglar" series revolves around the careers of Bernie Rhodenbarr, who operates a secondhand Greenwich Village bookstore by day and burglarizes Upper East Side apartments by night. His artistic and financially remunerative burglaries allow him to underwrite his passion for books, while exposing him to more serious crimes, for which he is often a suspect. With emotional guidance from his lesbian companion, Carolyn Kaiser, a Village pet groomer, Bernie manages to extricate himself from these accusations, usually by splitting the loot with the corrupt but well-intentioned cop, Ray Kirschmann, and thereby bringing the guilty to justice. For this quirky and light series, start with The Burglar Who Thought He Was Bogart (Dutton, 1995), in which Bernie becomes entangled with a Balkan monarchist conspiracy while attending a Bogart retrospective. Also catch The Burglar Who Traded Ted Williams (Dutton, 1994), in which Bernie combines his knowledge of thievery, baseball cards, and high finance to ensure the bookstore's financial survival.

James Lee Burke: No longer a secret from the best-seller list, Burke features Dave Robichaux, a detective in New Iberia parish, outside New Orleans. A recovering alcoholic and Vietnam vet, Robichaux seeks to protect his rural enclave from the corruption and commercialism of the Big Easy. Burke, a writing instructor at Wichita State, grew up in New Orleans and describes its texture, diversity, and sleaziness with intensity and love. Detective Robichaux tries to keep himself and his family altogether, but given his violent, alcoholic background and his need to protect his wife, Bootsie, and adopted daughter, that's hard. Robichaux often teams with Cletus Purcel, a free spirit for whom violence comes naturally, to fight the good fight.

Burke's best include A Morning for Flamingos (Avon,1990) and Burning Angel (Hyperion, 1995). He can overwrite, so avoid In the Electric Mist with Confederate Dead (Avon, 1993), unless you really get hooked on him.

Two other authors come to mind. Marcia Mueller: Her heroine, Sharon McCone, begins her career investigating for the All Souls' Legal Collective in San Francisco. McCone, a single woman trying to make it in a man's world, works to do good for her clients in the face of the need to generate legal fees. Begin with Trophies and Dead Things (The Mystery Press, 1990).

Stephen Greenleaf: Greenleaf is in limited print these days but worth the search. Reminiscent of Sam Spade, Greenleaf's John Tanner series captures a kind of cynicism that is inextricably linked with the urge to do good. Tanner, a rugged loner, charts his course through the counterculture as well as the big-time commercialism of the Bay Area. Greenleaf's best include Book Case (William Morrow & Co., 1991) and Death Bed (The Dial Press, 1980). All of these conflicted heroes lead unusual and sometimes tortured lives, which often force them to take violent action to protect their clients and sense of honor. Society at large rarely proves to be much help. In short, the perfect frame of mind for a day at the beach.

Margaret Steinfels

Margaret O'Brien Steinfels is the editor of Commonweal.

When I was young, I detested the novels of Henry James and Willa Cather--too much of nothing going on. The busy heroes and heroines of Charles Dickens and Jane Austen were far more appealing and readable; they did not dally in landscapes either psychic or scenic. Eventually I learned to read and even admire James, but never Cather.

A few summers ago, I spent some time in Taos, New Mexico, one of Cather's landscapes. Back home, I tried Death Comes for the Archbishop yet again. In contrast to my teen-age disdain for what seemed a desiccated travelogue, I found the story deeply moving and oddly inspiring. Over this Southwest amber landscape of scrub and cactus, of red-gold hills and dark plateaus, the light and air played like some great antiphonal chant. I could see it. I could see the archbishop, Jean Marie Latour; the fawn-colored mules, Contento and Angelica; Latour's ceaseless effort to bring the church to life. I could see the intense blue sky broken by a steady telegraphic flow of clouds; see the glowing light of dawn and dusk; and see the air so clear it seemed glowing too. I could even see Kit Carson's house, today a museum maintained by his Masonic order!

To appreciate Cather's achievement, must the reader know the landscape in which she set Archbishop Latour and his soulmate, Father Valliant? Or has this reader, anyway, finally learned to read without the reward of something clearly and definitively happening?

Over the last year, I have gone on to one of Cather's novellas, The Professor's House, set on an unspecified Great Lake, woodsy, leafy green in the summer, white and cold in the winter, in a university town where little seems to happen except that the life of a middle-aged man is subtly but utterly transformed by his--well, doing nothing. This summer I will take up what I set aside last winter, Shadows on the Rock. All three are collected in the Library of America edition, Willa Cather, Later Novels, ($35,991 pp.). (In a letter to the editor of Commonweal, November 23, 1927, Cather gives a brief account of how she came to write the story. Guess I wasn't reading yet!)

"Catching up" by overcoming the partialities of youth is one criterion for summer reading. Simply catching up is another. I began early this spring the autobiography of Katherine Graham, Personal History (Knopf, $29.95,625 pp.). Too big to carry along on planes, trains, or subways, the book settled to the bottom of a pile by the bed as my attention strayed. In July, I intend to pick it up again and read right through. It seems to fall into the category: Rich people have problems too. Though I am temporarily stopped in the second chapter, it is clear that Katherine Meyer Graham is destined to overcome the constraining life of the little rich girl and do remarkable things. I want to know more.

Despite lagging behind on Graham's very long volume, I own up to carting around and reading from cover to cover a volume almost as large. I could not leave Rising Tides at home. John M. Barry's engrossing history, subtitled, The Great Mississippi Flood of 1927 and How It Changed America (Simon and Schuster, $27.50,524 pp.), recounts the effort from the 1850s through the great flood of 1927 to tame the Mississippi of its regular and rampant overflow; an appendix, "The River Today," brings the story up to date.

The Mississippi River Valley along with its tributaries drains 41 percent of the United States, encompassing thirty-one states as far apart as New York, North Carolina, Idaho, and New Mexico. Only the Amazon basin is significantly larger. With that geography lesson, Barry begins a history, which encompasses the moral, social, intellectual, economic, and technological struggles that the United States faced from before the Civil War until after World War I. He does this by focusing on the effort to preserve the richest farm land in the world from the rampaging waters of the river that had created that very farm land.

The book opens with biographical sketches of James Buchanan Eads and Andrew Atkinson Humphreys who contested the very definition of control; Eads, a self-taught civil engineer, and Humphreys, head of the Army Corps of Engineers, had sharply contrasting ideas about controlling the river. Eads was more fight than wrong, and Humphreys more wrong than right, but the Corps' institutional longevity and political weight came to dictate a levees-only policy that magnified the damage of each succeeding flood, as Eads had predicted.

There is the story of New Orleans, among the richest and most powerful U.S. cities before the Great Depression, which destroyed itself morally, economically, and politically by unnecessarily dynamiting the levee of a neighboring Louisiana parish during the 1927 flood, and then reneging on promises of restitution.

There is the Percy family (Walker Percy is a descendant) of Greenville, Mississippi, exemplifying all the well-meaning delusions of race and class. Their blacks-only policy of sharecropping, which they considered enlightened, was shown during the 1927 flood to be simply another form of forced servitude. To keep blacks from moving north, Leroy Percy had them confined to the tops of the levees under armed guard. Their labor was precious, but not their lives or their dignity.

And along with much, much more, there was the man who made political hay of the flood, Herbert Hoover. He got himself elected president on the publicity of seeming to offer a well-ordered relief plan to hundreds of thousands of people turned out from homes and land by the flood.

We all know what happened to Hoover; but the rest of this history is worth recalling, for we continue to live with its consequences.