Purchase
Katrina, August 2015
Hardcover / e-Book
After the Flood
Simon & Schuster
August 2015
On Sale: August 11, 2015
480 pages ISBN: 1451692226 EAN: 9781451692228 Kindle: B00P434EH8 Hardcover / e-Book
Add to Wish List
Non-Fiction
Ten years after Hurricane Katrina made landfall in southeast
Louisiana—on August 29, 2005—journalist Gary Rivlin traces
the storm’s immediate damage, the city of New Orleans’s
efforts to rebuild itself, and the storm’s lasting effects
not just on the city’s geography and infrastructure—but on
the psychic, racial, and social fabric of one of this
nation’s great cities.
Much of New Orleans still sat
under water the first time Gary Rivlin glimpsed the city
after Hurricane Katrina. Then a staff reporter for The
New York Times, he was heading into the city to survey
the damage. The Interstate was eerily empty. Soldiers in
uniform and armed with assault rifles stopped him. Water
reached the eaves of houses for as far as the eye could
see. Four out of every five houses—eighty percent of
the city’s housing stock—had been flooded. Around that same
proportion of schools and businesses were wrecked. The
weight of all that water on the streets cracked gas and
water and sewer pipes all around town and the deluge had
drowned almost every power substation and rendered unusable
most of the city’s water and sewer system. People
living in flooded areas of the city could not be expected to
pay their property taxes for the foreseeable future. Nor
would all those boarded-up businesses—21,000 of the city’s
22,000 businesses were still shuttered six months after the
storm—be contributing their share of sales taxes and other
fees to the city’s coffers. Six weeks after the storm, the
city laid off half its workforce—precisely when so many
people were turning to its government for help. Meanwhile,
cynics both in and out of the Beltway were questioning the
use of taxpayer dollars to rebuild a city that sat mostly
below sea level. How could the city possibly come back?
This book traces the stories of New Orleanians of all
stripes—politicians and business owners, teachers and bus
drivers, poor and wealthy, black and white—as they confront
the aftermath of one of the great tragedies of our age and
reconstruct, change, and in some cases abandon a city that’s
the soul of this nation.
Comments
No comments posted.
Registered users may leave comments.
Log in or register now!
|