The Place with No Edge: An Intimate History of People, Technology, and the Mississippi River Delta

In The Place with No Edge, Adam Mandelman follows three centuries of human efforts to inhabit and control the lower Mississippi River delta, the vast watery flatlands spreading across much of southern Louisiana. He finds that people’s use of technology to tame unruly nature in the region has produced interdependence with—rather than independence from—the environment.

Created over millennia by deposits of silt and sand, the Mississippi River delta is one of the most dynamic landscapes in Nor...