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The Georgia Peach: Culture, Agriculture, and Environment in the American South by William Thomas Okie (review)

The author makes a strong case with a lot of data to justify titling her chapter, “The Death-Dealing Delta: A Climatological Viewpoint.” Themodern human face of theDelta beginswith chapter 7, “Sociodemographic Snapshots of the Mississippi Delta.” The historian’s perspective follows in chapter 8, and Seth C. McKee’s chapter on politics and race is very helpful in explaining how the region developed in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. As mentioned in the introduction to this review, the remaining part of the book looks at the culture of the region, from folklore andmusic, to food and literature. It is a fascinating tour of the region and how most people in the twenty-first century define it. While the authors do not cover the same specific spatial areas in their individual chapters, they do use the same general terminology, but the most used terms, such as alluvial, are not sufficiently defined. Alternately, some explanations are given multiple times, occasionally to the point of redundancy, which should have been corrected at the editorial level. At the same time, many of the authors write in the jargon of their specialized fields, which can frustrate a lay reader. The book is thus intended for an academic audience, which is unfortunate since the information would be useful if accessible for a general audience. Though the aim of the work is to answer a long-standing question about a unique region of the country, the authors do not use the same geographical coverage in their discussions, with some authors looking at conditions in a few counties, while others examine their fields as they relate to up to seven states, including Illinois, Kentucky, Missouri, Arkansas, Louisiana, Tennessee, and Mississippi. After a lengthy introduction that makes minimal reference to the Delta, “An Environmental Historian’s Perspective on the Mississippi Delta” only mentions specific counties in the southern Delta while discussing the drainage area of the Mississippi River from New York to Wyoming. This chapter also only deals with the “‘lower Mississippi River Delta’” (p. 123). This leaves the reader with an unclear definition of the Delta because the authors of each chapter only define the Delta within their individual fields without referencing the spatial delineations of other fields. An introduction that more clearly explains this fact and the reasons for the vast range of geographical areas referred to in the collection or placing chapter 8, “What Is the Mississippi Delta?,” at the beginning of the book would have been helpful. But perhaps Collins wants readers to realize that the Delta is a mystery still waiting to be solved and trying to define itself.