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Also by Douglas Brinkley:

The Nixon Tapes, August 2014
Hardcover / e-Book
Cronkite, June 2012
Hardcover / e-Book
The Quiet World, January 2011
Hardcover
The Wilderness Warrior, August 2009
Hardcover
Gerald R. Ford, February 2007
Hardcover
The Great Deluge, May 2006
Hardcover
Parish Priest, January 2006
Hardcover
National Geographic Visual History of the World, November 2005
Hardcover
The Boys of Pointe du Hoc, May 2005
Hardcover
The Unfinished Presidency: Jimmy Carter's Journey to the Nobel Peace Prize, May 1999
Trade Size (reprint)

The Great Deluge
Douglas Brinkley

Hurricane Katrina, New Orleans, and the Mississippi Gulf Coast

William Morrow
May 2006
272 pages
ISBN: 0061124230
Hardcover
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Non-Fiction

In the span of five violent hours on August 29, 2005, Hurricane Katrina destroyed major Gulf Coast cities and flattened 150 miles of coastline. Yet those wind-torn hours represented only the first stage of the relentless triple tragedy that Katrina brought to the entire Gulf Coast, from Louisiana to Mississippi to Alabama.

First came the hurricane, one of the three strongest ever to make landfall in the United States -- 150-mile- per-hour winds, with gusts measuring more than 180 miles per hour ripping buildings to pieces.

Second, the storm-surge flooding, which submerged a half million homes, creating the largest domestic refugee crisis since the Civil War. Eighty percent of New Orleans was under water, as debris and sewage coursed through the streets, and whole towns in south-eastern Louisiana ceased to exist.

And third, the human tragedy of government mis-management, which proved as cruel as the natural disaster itself. Ray Nagin, the mayor of New Orleans, implemented an evacuation plan that favored the rich and healthy. Kathleen Blanco, governor of Louisiana, dithered in the most important aspect of her job: providing leadership in a time of fear and confusion. Michael C. Brown, the FEMA director, seemed more concerned with his sartorial splendor than the specter of death and horror that was taking New Orleans into its grip.

In The Great Deluge, bestselling author Douglas Brinkley, a New Orleans resident and professor of history at Tulane University, rips the story of Katrina apart and relates what the Category 3 hurricane was like from every point of view. The book finds the true heroes -- such as Coast Guard officer Jimmy Duckworth and hurricane jock Tony Zumbado.

Throughout the book, Brinkley lets the Katrina survivors tell their own stories, masterly allowing them to record the nightmare that was Katrina. The Great Deluge investigates the failure of government at every level and breaks important new stories. Packed with interviews and original research, it traces the character flaws, inexperience, and ulterior motives that allowed the Katrina disaster to devastate the Gulf Coast.

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