| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 111.1

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 111.1 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Canada and the United States

Ari Kelman. A River and Its City: The Nature of Landscape in New Orleans. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. 2003. Pp. xiii, 283. $29.95.

Visitors to New Orleans by the mid-nineteenth century were awed by the "artifice" that kept the mighty Mississippi—a whole continent's floodwaters—from inundating the city. Built steadily since 1717, the high levees towered above the city and focused its residents on the waterfront that had always defined the settlement's main function as the entrepôt of the continent's interior. "No triumph of art over the obstacles of nature has ever been so complete," one early observer remarked (p. 60). Ari Kelman's masterful study of the nature-urban interface at the Mississippi's banks reveals the massive extent of this hubris. Hurricane Katrina's complete inundation of New Orleans in September 2005, displacing millions and killing more than 800 people, reinforces the book's wise and learned thesis that the "nature" of the river is as much a human construct as the city, but also that the "river has been an actor in the production of urban space" (p. 16).

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