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Katrina: After the Flood
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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 affects 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.
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Ten years later, the scale of the destruction wrought by Hurricane Katrina still seems staggering. At Category 5, it was the third strongest storm ever documented in America, with a six-meter storm surge and winds up to 175 mph. The devastation covered 90,000 square miles, caused $80 billion in damages, and took 1,800 lives. Fans of
Five Days at Memorial
will want to continue the story with this thorough journalistic look at Katrina’s years-long aftermath. Rivlin profiles dozens of ordinary
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I have been reading this book for the past three days and even though it brought back some horrible memories about what we all went through during and after Hurricane Katrina this is the only book that I've read that has really captured the whole truth about this time in my life. I remember everything Gary Rivlin wrote in this book. It was truly incredible what a wonderful job he did with this. I don't have to ever read anything else and know that what I know now at the ten year anniversary of H
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This book is mostly about the politics and social/racial aspect of the recovery. Very little detail on the process of recovery, long-term economic analysis, engineering improvements and infrastructure. Read only if you are interested in Mayor Nagin and all the other policy makers and recovery committees involved. Not the most interesting part of the recovery story of New Orleans if you ask me.
It’s hard to believe that it has been ten years since Katrina rolled through New Orleans and other parts of the Gulf. It also marked ten years since Rita left her mark on southwest Louisiana. The focus has always been on New Orleans, perhaps because of the storm that followed in Katrina’s wake.
In his new book, Katrina: After the Flood, journalist Gary Rivlin portrays the dysfunction, the politics, and the blatant racism that followed the storm. On assignment for The New York Times, Rivlin spent ...more
In his new book, Katrina: After the Flood, journalist Gary Rivlin portrays the dysfunction, the politics, and the blatant racism that followed the storm. On assignment for The New York Times, Rivlin spent ...more
This sweeping work looks at the recovery (or lack thereof) in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina. Although the cast of characters sometimes seemed a bit too large to keep track of, Rivilin did a good job of bringing everything together at the end. This was a sad account, full of tales government ineptitude and neglect, that was ultimately brightened by the actions of individuals doing what they could to fill the needs they saw in their community.
This is awful to say but one of the best things to come out of the Katrina disaster was all the great books about New Orleans (and Katrina). This is one of those great books. The perfect amount of narrative, data and perspective. A fantastic and enthralling read, and a must for anybody interested in New Orleans.
One of the best non-fiction works I have ever read. Heartbreaking. There was so much I learned that I had never realized before I read this book. Shows the very best of people and also the very worst brought about by this man-made disaster. A must-read.
I'd like to thank Simon and Schuster for sending me this book in exchange for my review. This was a very hard book for me to read. Having lived through Katrina, and having my own "after the flood" stories worthy of being entered into Rivlin's book, I was reluctant to read about others' misery. I had avoided all of the 10-year anniversary coverage on TV, and then the book arrived on August 29, I have to applaud Rivlin on the ambitious scope of research and material found within this endeavor. I h
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I received this book as part of the GOODREADS FIRST READ contest and couldn't be more pleased to have won it! It's a book I would have gladly paid money for!!
Once I picked it up, it was SO compelling that it was difficult to put down. The stories and views that were on the news during the Katrina situation could not adequately describe portray the situation; this book takes you inside!
I don't want to spoil this read for anyone else because it really is an emotional journey! All I can say is that ...more
Once I picked it up, it was SO compelling that it was difficult to put down. The stories and views that were on the news during the Katrina situation could not adequately describe portray the situation; this book takes you inside!
I don't want to spoil this read for anyone else because it really is an emotional journey! All I can say is that ...more
I won a free copy of this book through the Goodreads giveaway program. I had expected it to cover the entire impacted region, but the book just focuses on New Orleans. This should have been clearer from the title.
What I liked about the book – the author does a good job of documenting the sheer incompetence and negligence of the various government administrations, mainly at the mayoral level and the presidential level. The mayor and president were too busy playing party politics to really care ...more
What I liked about the book – the author does a good job of documenting the sheer incompetence and negligence of the various government administrations, mainly at the mayoral level and the presidential level. The mayor and president were too busy playing party politics to really care ...more
Reading Sheri Fink’s Five Days at Memorial last month has given me a strange fascination for Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath. When I saw Gary Rivlin’s Katrina: After the Flood listed on NetGalley for review, I leapt at the chance to read it. The book chronicles the nearly ten years that have passed since Katrina destroyed New Orleans and the Gulf Coast. I read it because I wanted to know what’s happened to the city since it’s faded from the national conscience. Katrina: After the Flood is wr
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I’ve always enjoyed visiting New Orleans, but at the same time, I have always felt like it is somewhat dysfunctional compared to other large cities I’ve visited. I now understand some of the history as to why I have had that feeling.
I liked the way the author weaved in personal stories about wealthy and no so wealthy individuals and how they were affected at this time. He put a face and a personality on the events taking place and what this did to the individuals during this time. The dismal re ...more
I liked the way the author weaved in personal stories about wealthy and no so wealthy individuals and how they were affected at this time. He put a face and a personality on the events taking place and what this did to the individuals during this time. The dismal re ...more
What a feat. This book is so thorough and, for much of it, so readable. It does eventually become overwhelming. I couldn't keep track of all of the characters after a while. And I didn't care enough to try to back read to re-find out who they were. There are lots of paragraphs that didn't really need to be in here. A leaner book would've been five stars for me. But it certainly is an impressive amount of reporting. I learned a lot about my home state, about the federal government and local polit
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One of my top 3 books of 2015. Incredible, amazing, heartbreaking. I think I read 50% of it out loud to my husband because I was so appalled at what I was reading. An in depth look at everything that happened during and after Katrina in terms of recovery. I liked the exposes of the politicians involved and also the close-up looks at several individuals and business owners and how they were faring. I felt like I knew the people by the end. Really knew who they were. Highly recommend.
Very engrossing. The book details the roles of several key players, local politicians and business owners from New Orleans, as well as local families, in the struggle to rebuild in the years after Hurricane Katrina. I found the first hand accounts gave me a new perspective of what it was like for the people who lived through this whole ordeal. I felt that there was a good discussion of politics, history and geography to help understand why things happened the way that they did.
Exhaustive, unsentimental, fine-grained. Written with an outsider’s understandable perplexity toward Louisiana politics, and a pointed awareness of racial inequity that I hoped would develop into a more full-throated condemnation. There are heroes and villains in this book, and some of them help the reporting come alive— I would’ve liked more of their energy animating it’s pages.
A good read to help better understand New Orleans in the aftermath of Katrina. The racial and socioeconomic tension, the personalities, the fall of Ray Nagin, the extreme differences in how some neighborhoods moved on and others did not and how the government and city elites willed it along or fought it. Probably a required reading to understand post-Katrina New Orleans.
This is a must read about the bureaucratic and political aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. Was glad to read the stories of neighbors bonding together to make progress but also quite disgusted at the political infighting that left residents with little to no help for years after the hurricane.
More so than any contemporary or recent historical gaffe or tryst, the Bush White House's inaction after Katrina will be remembered as the biggest presidential screwup of the modern era. It was the moment where Bush's incompetence and GOP Svengali Karl Rove's psychopathy were most apparent, and, even in hindsight, there's no excusing it. Yet, as this book makes clear, failings after Katrina were exclusive neither to the Republican Party nor to the Federal Government as plenty of blame can be pla
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The aftermath of Katrina is a tough story to tell in 430 pages, but Rivlin does a respectable job throwing as much as he can at you without letting it get overwhelming. What I really appreciate about this book is how the author really lays bare the racial gap in the recovery - white people and people with money came out well, poor people and minorities were often not given enough support to rebuild their homes and lives, and the changes this disparity has wrought on the city are extremely visibl
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Katrina: After the Flood is perhaps one of the best non-fiction books I've read in a long time. When I picked it up initially, I thought based on the description that it would be a factual account of the days, months, and years following the hurricane. While it did offer a factional account of events, the real story ended up being a series of human interest tales woven around the events and politics that surrounded the flood. I thought that Rivlin chose his characters well and that they represen
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While Rivlin is a tireless documenter of facts, events, and political turns in post-Katrina New Orleans, there was no real coherent, focused narrative of the events, nothing to tie these things together except for a chronology, or proposed cause and effect. No doubt, the post-Katrina debacle was almost as damaging as the storm itself, and the book clearly maps out the administrative and political failures that caused it, so if you want to know about these, it's an important book. But the idea th
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Densely packed with information, this book is a rough ride through treacherous waters. Highly readable, politically intriguing, depressingly familiar. The tragedy that transformed a city also transformed many, many lives. Nothing about the animals, though; this one is about the impact of by on humans.
I was a little disappointed. This book was well researched but it spent too much time on meetings and discussions of how to restore New Orleans. I really wanted more of a narration of what happened to the residents during the years of recovery and that seemed to be thrown in as an afterthought.
Lots of interesting information but it was very disjointed and I couldn't keep all the players straight.
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This is a really powerful, detailed book about Katrina. Also depressing as hell.
I love everything about New Orleans and have always been fascinated by Hurricane Katrina. I have read several books about individuals and their rebuilding efforts, but not one that took an overall look at the aftermath and rebuilding of the whole city after the storm. This book does just that and does it very well. It was amazing to read about the tons of recovery dollars from various sources that flowed into the city, the multiple organizations that were founded to help various sectors of the c
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I’ve only ever visited NOLA after Katrina, but it holds such a special place in my heart - a sparkly, vibrant, tenacious, and loving city. Reading about the city’s recovery after the storm really brought home the dark underbelly of one of my favourite places - the racist, corrupt, and self-serving politicians, policy-makers, and other opportunists who bungled the city’s renaissance and continue to plague its streets. It seems New Orleans thrives in spite of, not in any way due to, the structural
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A truly comprehensive look at all that went wrong and right before, during, and after Katrina, and really the most in-depth look at the figures involved that I've encountered. I met Mack McClendon and visited his Lower Ninth Ward Village Community Center in 2010 with a group from the NLG. I remember his enthusiasm for sharing what he wanted his Center to be for the people in the community. We also met with public housing activists who were trying to save public housing projects on the demo list.
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This book is about Katrina and New Orleans. It discusses the storm itself and the breaking of the levees for approximately 25 pages. The majority of the book are about 10-30 page chapters, each professing to be about a different topic but which somehow ends up circling back to politics and Ray Nagin, the mayor of New Orleans. I thought this book was going to be about the clean-up and putting back together of New Orleans after the storm, but it really is just politics. Just politics. The synopsis
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