Left to Chance: Hurricane Katrina and the Story of Two New Orleans Neighborhoods

The Katrina Bookshelf

by Steve Kroll-Smith, Vern Baxter, Pam Jenkins

How do survivors recover from the worst urban flood in American history, a disaster that destroyed nearly the entire physical landscape of a city, as well as the mental and emotional maps that people use to navigate their everyday lives? This question has haunted the survivors of Hurricane Katrina and informed the response to the subsequent flooding of New Orleans across many years.

Left to Chance takes us into two African American neighborhoods—working-class Hollygrove and middle-class Pontchartrain Park—to learn how their residents have experienced “Miss Katrina” and the long road back to normal life. The authors spent several years gathering firsthand accounts of the flooding, the rushed evacuations that turned into weeks- and months-long exile, and the often confusing and exhausting process of rebuilding damaged homes in a city whose local government had all but failed. As the residents’ stories make vividly clear, government and social science concepts such as “disaster management,” “restoring normality,” and “recovery” have little meaning for people whose worlds were washed away in the flood. For the neighbors in Hollygrove and Pontchartrain Park, life in the aftermath of Katrina has been a passage from all that was familiar and routine to an ominous world filled with raw existential uncertainty. Recovery and rebuilding become processes imbued with mysteries, accidental encounters, and hasty adaptations, while victories and defeats are left to chance.

Genres: Nonfiction

180 pages, Paperback

First published September 1, 2015

Reviews

[Daniel Te · Rating 3 out of 5]

If we were to look at the Katrina Bookshelf as a spectrum, from most specific to most broad, it would be Standing in the Need, Left to Chance, Children of Katrina, and then Is This America. Even though I thought this book was well written (and also some beautiful prose in here, great job Steve Kroll-Smith), I think it suffers a bit from being a bit too middle of the spectrum, so I think some more distinguishing factors or another kind of viewpoint would be able to shed some more new light on the situation from Katrina.

[Shelia Montclair · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a book that gets-up-close and teaches us, through the stories of those who lived through Katrina, what the experience of disaster is like. The authors do a good job of moving back and forth between the words of those they interviewed and their own conceptual understanding of what is going on. At the end of the book there is a convincing essay on the problems embedded in the use of the word "recovery" when talking about disaster.

[Rob Eastin · Rating 3 out of 5]

Interesting book which helped me to learn a lot about the aftermath and failures with Katrina recovery

[Rick Reitzug · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5 stars--This is a difficult book to review because it is more of an academic/scholarly-type book vs. a popular press book. The narratives of those who experienced Katrina were definitely the most powerful parts of the book and were consistent with those I heard from victims of Katrina during the 10-15 weeks I spent helping with gutting/mucking and reconstruction efforts in New Orleans and the Mississippi Gulf Coast in the years after Katrina. However, the interpretations drawn from those narratives were, in my opinion, often not as focused and sharply explained as they might have been. An exception is the final chapter and its discussion of recovery. As a qualitative researcher I also would have liked to have heard even more of the voices of the participants throughout the book. Nonetheless, even after having read many Katrina-related books, the book provoked some additional thinking and is worth reading.

[Lance Delaware · Rating 5 out of 5]

I got right up close to people living with the craziness that was Hurricane Katrina. This is both a history and a sociology of disaster.

[John]

(no. 46 of 2015)