The Great Deluge
Hurricane Katrina, New Orleans, and the Mississippi Gulf Coast
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- $13.99
Publisher Description
When Hurricane Katrina hit the Gulf Coast, writer Douglas Brinkley was forced to evacuate his home along with scores of his fellow New Orleans residents. Now the New York Times best-selling author of The Boys of Pointe du Hoc and Tour of Duty tells the complete tale of the terrible storm.
Through detailed research and interviews with survivors, Brinkley investigates the failure of government at every level to manage this devastating tragedy. He also explains the political, social, and economic factors that led to the breakdown of the New Orleans levee system, particularly how the Mississippi Gulf Coast was never properly rebuilt after Hurricane Camille in 1969.
Douglas Brinkley is professor of history and director of the Theodore Roosevelt Center at Tulane University. Four of his books have been selected as New York Times Notable Books of the Year. His last three historical narratives, Tour of Duty, The Boys of Pointe du Hoc and Parish Priest were all New York Times best-sellers. A contributing editor to Vanity Fair and American Heritage, he lives in New Orleans with his wife, Anne, and their two children, Benton and Johnny.
“... its thick detail provides a ground-level view of human behavior far richer than the breathless news reports that stunned and shamed the nation in the summer of 2005.”— New York Times Book Review
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Historian Brinkley (Tour of Duty, etc.) opens his detailed examination of the awful events that took place on the Gulf Coast late last summer by describing how a New Orleans animal shelter began evacuating its charges at the first notice of the impending storm. The Louisiana SPCA, Brinkley none too coyly points out, was better prepared for Katrina than the city of New Orleans. It's groups like the SPCA, as well as compassionate citizens who used their own resources to help others, whom Brinkley hails as heroes in his heavy, powerful account and, unsurprisingly, authorities like Mayor Ray Nagin, Gov. Kathleen Blanco and former FEMA director Michael C. Brown whom he lambastes most fiercely. The book covers August 27 through September 3, 2005, and uses multiple narrative threads, an effect that is disorienting but appropriate for a book chronicling the helter-skelter environment of much of New Orleans once the storm had passed, the levees had been breached, and the city was awash in "toxic gumbo." Naturally outraged at the damage wrought by the storm and worsened by the ill-prepared authorities, Brinkley, a New Orleans resident, is generally levelheaded, even when reporting on Brown's shallow e-mails to friends while "the trapped were dying" or recounting heretofore unreported atrocities, such as looters defecating on property as a mark of empowerment. Photos.
