Holding Back the River: The Struggle Against Nature on America's Waterways

by Tyler J. Kelley Narrated by Samantha Desz

Overview

A revelatory work of reporting on the men and women wrestling to harness and preserve America's most vital natural resource: our rivers.

The Mississippi. The Missouri. The Ohio. America's rivers are the very lifeblood of our country. We need them for nourishing crops, for cheap bulk transportation, for hydroelectric power, for fresh drinking water. Rivers are also part of our mythology, our collective soul; they are Mark Twain, Led Zeppelin, and the Delta Blues. But as infrastructure across the nation fails and climate change pushes rivers and seas to new heights, we've arrived at a critical moment in our battle to tame these often-destructive forces of nature.

Tyler J. Kelley spent two years traveling the heartland, getting to know the men and women whose lives and livelihoods rely on these tenuously tamed streams. On the Illinois-Kentucky border, we encounter Luther Helland, master of the most important-and most decrepit-lock and dam in America. This old dam at the end of the Ohio River was scheduled to be replaced in 1998, but twenty years and $3 billion later, its replacement still isn't finished. As the old dam crumbles and commerce grinds to a halt, Helland and his team must risk their lives, using steam-powered equipment and sheer brawn, to raise and lower the dam as often as ten times a year.

In Southeast Missouri, we meet Twan Robinson, who lives in the historically Black village of Pinhook. As a super-flood rises on the Mississippi, she learns from her sister that the US Army Corps of Engineers is going to blow up the levee that stands between her home and the river. With barely enough notice to evacuate her elderly mother and pack up a few of her own belongings, Robinson escapes to safety only to begin a nightmarish years-long battle to rebuild her lost community.

Atop a floodgate in central Louisiana, we're beside Major General Richard Kaiser, the man responsible for keeping North America's greatest river under control. Kaiser stands above the spot where the Mississippi River wants to change course, abandoning Baton Rouge and New Orleans, and following the Atchafalaya River to the sea. The daily flow of water from one river to the other is carefully regulated, but something else is happening that may be out of Kaiser and the Corps' control.

America's infrastructure is old and underfunded. While our economy, society, and climate have changed, our levees, locks, and dams have not. Yet to fix what's wrong will require more than money. It will require an act of imagination. “With meticulous research and insightful analysis” (Publishers Weekly), Holding Back the River brings us into the lives of the Americans who grapple with our mighty rivers and, through their stories, suggests solutions to some of the century's greatest challenges.

Editorial Reviews

JUNE 2021 - AudioFile

Samantha Desz narrates with careful pacing and an intelligent “facts first” approach. Her clear delivery fits this inquiry into how the rerouting of rivers has worked and for whom. She allows the anecdotes of engineers, barge captains, and, most tellingly, farmers and homeowners whose lands have been destroyed to tell their stories. Her crisp voice works to elucidate the tough medicine this audiobook delivers. Kelley has researched his subjects thoroughly and gives listeners a lot to think about. The author scrutinizes the shortsightedness of river rerouting and dam placement that too often ignored the long-term implications of managing nature. The Netherlands is seen as a model nation for its farsighted commitment to land and water management. A.D.M. © AudioFile 2021, Portland, Maine

Publishers Weekly

02/08/2021

Journalist Kelley debuts with an illuminating look at the people and policies working to tame America’s rivers. Kelley’s focus is on the Ohio, Missouri, and Mississippi Rivers, and the challenges facing the Army Corps of Engineers as the rivers change and as the dams, dikes, and levees designed to keep them in place become obsolete. “A long line of American leaders from both parties have lacked the will, power, or imagination to build what the country needs,” Kelley writes, and traces policies from an 1824 bill that expanded the Corps’ authority to Trump’s unrealized promise to spend billions on infrastructure. Kelley introduces such players as Luther Helland, the master of the “most decrepit” lock and dam in the U.S., built on the Ohio River in 1929; Lester Goodin, a fifth-generation farmer who made use of a breached levee to grow trees along the Mississippi; and Mitch Jurisich, an oysterman in Louisiana who worries he’ll lose his business if the Mississippi is diverted to prevent coastal erosion. Along with the meticulous reporting and insightful analysis, Kelley considers a series of remedies, including some drawn from successful flood control programs in the Netherlands. Anyone concerned with the myriad issues surrounding the manipulation of waterways will want to take a look. Renee Zuckerbrot, Massie & McQuilkin. (Apr.)

From the Publisher

A spirited tour of America’s great rivers—the Mississippi, Missouri, and Ohio—and the structures built to tame them. [Holding Back the River] is a rigorously researched and empathetic account of those whose lives and work are linked to the rivers. . . . Like many great books that usher readers into a new world, Holding Back the River opens with maps. I found myself flipping to them constantly, tracing winding branches to find where rivers meet, how what happens upstream impacts others downriver. Kelley excels at tracking such connections and competing interests.”
—Undark

“With careful, artful reporting and an instinct for the plot lines laid out by flowing water, Tyler J. Kelley has written a highly readable book. He takes two important subjects—the middle part of our country, and its water-related infrastructure—and shows how fascinating they are. Holding Back the River is a wonderful achievement.”
—Ian Frazier, author of Great Plains and On the Rez

“Poignant and powerful . . . [A] passionate, provocative debut.”
—Los Angeles Review of Books

“Tyler Kelley has written on the one hand a good and sometimes painful story—or stories—showing us at our most human, and on the other an insightful and important examination of our policy toward rivers. This is a fine book.”
—John M. Barry, author of Rising Tide: The Great Mississippi Flood of 1927 and How it Changed America

“What a mess we’ve made! How hard can it be to let water run downhill? Yet here is Tyler J. Kelley’s riveting account of the consequences of human attempts to channel, divert, confine, and conquer the mid-continental plumbing of North America. Not an easy book to write, this is a story everyone needs to read, especially as we blunder further into the great unknown of climate change.”
—Eric W. Sanderson, author of Mannahatta: A Natural History of New York City and Terra Nova: The New World After Oil, Cars, and Suburbs

“Kelley’s journalistic approach to his subject serves him well, allowing him to weave stories of the people fighting and affected by this struggle—from farmers to engineers, colonels to elected officials—into detailed explanations of river flow concepts and floodplains, lock and dam construction and function, and the Army Corps’ ceaseless efforts to keep all the plates spinning. At the same time, he drives home the stakes for the entire country, regardless of whether you live anywhere near a major 'inland waterway,' because of the importance of both massively productive farmland and cheap river transportation to our economy.”
—Civil Engineering magazine

“In vivid detail . . . [journalist Tyler J. Kelley] describes the delicate dance performed every day to ferry massive amounts of goods along these waterways and relays how they came to play such an important role in America’s economy. . . . Holding Back the River is a riveting depiction of an issue that is not going away anytime soon.”
—BookPage

“A sweeping examination of geology, geography, social history, and economics, delivered in readable fashion.”
—Booklist

“An illuminating look at the people and policies working to tame America’s rivers . . . with meticulous reporting and insightful analysis. . . . Anyone concerned with the myriad issues surrounding the manipulation of waterways will want to take a look.”
—Publishers Weekly

“A sobering tour of aging infrastructure built under different circumstances in the first half of the 20th century . . . Kelley’s engaging work will draw in those interested in personal stories of the effects of climate change, and use of natural resources.”
—Library Journal

“A gimlet-eyed look at America’s rapidly deteriorating riparian infrastructure . . . Solid journalism on a pressing problem that is likely to get far worse, and soon.”
—Kirkus Reviews

“[An] insightful, provocative book . . . Kelley is an astute and careful writer. . . . Besides being well-written and offering a basinwide understanding of water-management issues affecting the Mississippi River, Kelley’s book is especially timely as Congress debates another huge infrastructure bill, a debate that could last all summer.”
—Waterways Journal

“In Holding Back the River, journalist Tyler J. Kelley travels the country to speak with people whose lives and livelihoods are dependent upon these crumbling structures, to show just how tenuous humanity’s relationship with rivers has become.”
—LitHub

“We like to think that we have control over our waterways and what floats on them but focusing on the nation’s most-relied-upon rivers, this book introduces readers to the people whose lives depend on the rivers in many ways, and it exposes the mythology and the truth of what could happen if the dams, locks, or gates fail, ecologically, economically, and to society. Those structures are aging. Learn what’s being done about them.”
—Terri Schlichenmeyer

Library Journal

04/01/2021

Journalist Kelley examines navigation along the Mississippi River and its tributaries (primarily the Missouri and Ohio Rivers) in the central United States. His book is a sobering tour of aging infrastructure built under different circumstances in the first half of the 20th century. Outdated levees, dams, and locks are a tragedy waiting to happen, he predicts. Kelley speaks with people invested in the success of these structures, from farmers to barge masters to civil engineers. The author also tells how Indigenous peoples are disproportionally affected by natural and infrastructure disasters. The interviews with the book's subjects bring to life the problems they face and the balancing acts they engage in. Farmers need the rich soil that is deposited during controlled floods, but the volume of these floods has dramatically increased with climate change. Cities along these rivers are partly built on flood plains, which makes residents in those areas extremely vulnerable. The commerce along the rivers is essential to the U.S. economy, so civil engineers juggle limited funding and changing dynamics as they struggle to keep rivers controlled and navigable. Cities in the Mississippi Delta in Louisiana illustrate the inexorable changes wrought by nature. Kelley also compares water management in the U.S. and the Netherlands. VERDICT Kelley's engaging work will draw in those interested in personal stories of the effects of climate change, and use of natural resources.—Caren Nichter, Univ. of Tennessee at Martin

JUNE 2021 - AudioFile

Samantha Desz narrates with careful pacing and an intelligent “facts first” approach. Her clear delivery fits this inquiry into how the rerouting of rivers has worked and for whom. She allows the anecdotes of engineers, barge captains, and, most tellingly, farmers and homeowners whose lands have been destroyed to tell their stories. Her crisp voice works to elucidate the tough medicine this audiobook delivers. Kelley has researched his subjects thoroughly and gives listeners a lot to think about. The author scrutinizes the shortsightedness of river rerouting and dam placement that too often ignored the long-term implications of managing nature. The Netherlands is seen as a model nation for its farsighted commitment to land and water management. A.D.M. © AudioFile 2021, Portland, Maine

Kirkus Reviews

2021-02-24
A gimlet-eyed look at America’s rapidly deteriorating riparian infrastructure.

In the days of Lewis and Clark, writes freelance journalist Kelley, the sight of the Missouri River in seasonal flood, overspilling its banks and “spreading out to fill its floodplain,” would have seemed entirely natural. Their successors in the Army Corps of Engineers took a dim view of rivers doing their own thing, though, and over time the nation has invested trillions of dollars in efforts to control them, from huge dams to the extensive levee system along the lower Mississippi. These structures are now crumbling, and although the Trump administration talked a big game about investing in infrastructure, it was consistently sidetracked by diversions of the president’s own making—the testimony of James Comey on Russian involvement in the 2016 election, for instance, overshadowing a promise to ease regulations on coal and boost the barge industry. The professional organization of civil engineers rates the nation’s dams at a D, identifying more than 15,500 as being of “high-hazard potential”—i.e., likely to cause deaths if they failed. Of a critically important lock on the Ohio River, its manager sighs, “The lock is kept going with all the bubble gum and duct tape we’ve got left.” Meanwhile, even as the Corps of Engineers negotiates new spillways and scrambles to keep up with existing structures, nature works to thwart their efforts. For example, a projected plan to divert the Mississippi to Louisiana’s Barataria Bay would kill some of the state’s most lucrative oyster beds and a resident dolphin population—all in service of trying to keep New Orleans from going underwater, which seems destined to happen anyway, with a “new shoreline…around the latitude of Baton Rouge and the north shore of Lake Pontchartrain.” Kelley concludes with an exhortation to develop “a basin-based approach” to river management while there’s still a little time left.

Solid journalism on a pressing problem that is likely to get far worse, and soon.

Product Details

BN ID:	2940172965272
Publisher:	Simon & Schuster
Publication date:	04/20/2021
Edition description:	Unabridged

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