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Hurricane Katrina and the Near Death of a Great American City
Random House
July 2006
432 pages
ISBN: 1400065526
Hardcover
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Non-Fiction
Hurricane Katrina shredded one of the great cities of the
South, and as levees failed and the federal relief effort
proved lethally incompetent, a natural disaster became a
man-made catastrophe. As an editor of New Orleans’ daily
newspaper, the Pulitzer Prize—winning Times-Picayune, Jed
Horne has had a front-row seat to the unfolding drama of the
city’s collapse into chaos and its continuing struggle to
survive. As the Big One bore down, New Orleanians rich and poor,
black and white, lurched from giddy revelry to mandatory
evacuation. The thousands who couldn’t or wouldn’t leave
initially congratulated themselves on once again riding out
the storm. But then the unimaginable happened: Within a day
80 percent of the city was under water. The rising tides
chased horrified men and women into snake-filled attics and
onto the roofs of their houses. Heroes in swamp boats and
helicopters braved wind and storm surge to bring survivors
to dry ground. Mansions and shacks alike were swept away,
and then a tidal wave of lawlessness inundated the Big Easy.
Screams and gunshots echoed through the blacked-out
Superdome. Police threw away their badges and joined in the
looting. Corpses drifted in the streets for days, and
buildings marinated for weeks in a witches’ brew of toxic
chemicals that, when the floodwaters finally were pumped
out, had turned vast reaches of the city into a ghost town. Horne takes readers into the private worlds and inner
thoughts of storm victims from all walks of life to weave a
tapestry as intricate and vivid as the city itself.
Politicians, thieves, nurses, urban visionaries, grieving
mothers, entrepreneurs with an eye for quick profit at
public expense–all of these lives collide in a chronicle
that is harrowing, angry, and often slyly ironic. Even before stranded survivors had been plucked from their
roofs, government officials embarked on a vicious blame game
that further snarled the relief operation and bedeviled
scientists striving to understand the massive levee failures
and build New Orleans a foolproof flood defense. As Horne
makes clear, this shameless politicization set the tone for
the ongoing reconstruction effort, which has been haunted by
racial and class tensions from the start.
Katrina was a catastrophe deeply rooted in the politics and
culture of the city that care forgot and of a nation that
forgot to care. In Breach of Faith, Jed Horne has created a
spellbinding epic of one of the worst disasters of our time.
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