1 Dead in Attic
After Katrina
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- $18.99
Publisher Description
With a new foreword by the author—Chris Rose’s New York Times bestselling collection: “A gripping book about life’s challenges in post-Katrina New Orleans…packed with heart, honesty, and wit” (New Republic).
Celebrated as a local classic and heaped with national praise, 1 Dead in Attic is a brilliant collection of columns by an award-winning Times-Picayune journalist chronicling the horrific damage and aftermath wrought by Hurricane Katrina in 2006. “Frank and compelling...vivid and invaluable” (Booklist), it is a roller coaster ride through a devastated American wasteland as it groans for rebirth. Full of the emotion, tragedy and even humor—which has made Chris Rose a favorite son and the voice of a lost city—these are the stories of the dead and the living, of survivors and believers, of destruction and recovery, and of hope and despair.
With photographs by British photojournalist Charlie Varley, 1 Dead in Attic captures New Orleans caught between an old era and a new, New Orleans in its most desperate time, as it struggled out of floodwaters and willed itself back to life.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The physical and psychic dislocation wrought by Hurricane Katrina is painstakingly recollected in this brilliant collection of columns by award-winning New Orleans Times Picayune columnist Rose (who has already hand-sold 60,000 self-published copies). After evacuating his family first to Mississippi and then to his native Maryland, Rose returned almost immediately to chronicle his adopted hometown's journey to hell and back. Rose deftly sketches portraits of the living, from the cat lady who survives the storm only to die from injuries sustained during a post-hurricane mugging, to the California National Guard troops who gratefully chow down on steaks Rose managed to turn up in an unscathed French Quarter freezer. He's equally adept at evoking the spirit of the dead and missing, summed up by the title, quoting the entirety of an epitaph spray painted on one home. Although the usual suspects (FEMA and Mayor Ray Nagin, among others) receive their fair share of barbs, Rose's rancor toward the powers that be is surprisingly muted. In contrast, he chronicles his own descent into mental illness (and subsequent recovery) with unsparing detail; though his maniacal dedication to witnessing the innumerable tragedies wrought by The Thing took him down a dark, dangerous path ( three friends of mine have, in fact, killed themselves in the past year ), it also produced one of the finest first-person accounts yet in the growing Katrina canon.
