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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 great 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. The result, Holding Back the River, is a deeply human exploration of how our centuries-long dream of conquering and shaping this vast network of waterways squares with the reality of an indomitable natural world.
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. Meticulously researched and as lively as it is informative, 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.
Tyler J. Kelley is a journalist who has written for the New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and The New Yorker among other publications. Kelley currently teaches at The New School in the Journalism + Design program. His previous projects include the documentary film Following Seas, codirected with his wife Araby Kelley. They live with their son in Brooklyn.
Dr. John O. Anfinson has been researching, writing and speaking about the upper Mississippi River for over 30 years. He spent the first half of his federal career with the St. Paul District, Corps of Engineers, as a historian and cultural resources specialist. He then spent the second half with the Mississippi National River and Recreation Area, a unit of the National Park Service, where he served Superintendent from 2014-2020.
John is the author of The River We Have Wrought: A History of the Upper Mississippi (2003), River of History (2003). He sits on several boards, including Friends of the Mississippi River, Minnesota Aquatic Invasive Species Research Center, Minnesota and National Mississippi River Parkway Commission, and the National Parks Conservation Association. John holds a Ph.D. in U.S. History from the University of Minnesota.