12/1/2015BookFilter | Evernote Web https://www.evernote.com/Home.action#n=35b84d08-3a1c-4166-9556-c5b049621292&ses=4&sh=2&sds=5&1/3HomeTop Picks: All BooksKatrina After the Flood MoreKatrinaby Gary RivlinPrice: $27.00(Hardcover)Published: August 11, 2015Rating: 0.0/5 (0 votes cast)From the Publisher: Ten years after Hurricane Katrina madelandfall in southeast Louisiana—on August 29, 2005—journalistGary Rivlin traces the storm’s immediate damage, the city of NewOrleans’s efforts to rebuild itself, and the storm’s lasting affects notjust 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 Rivlinglimpsed the city after Hurricane Katrina.</p><p> Then a staff reporter forThe New York Times, he was heading into the city to survey thedamage.</p><p> The Interstate was eerily empty.</p><p> Soldiers in uniform andarmed with assault rifles stopped him.</p><p> Water reached the eaves ofhouses for as far as the eye could see.Four out of every five houses—eighty percent of the city’s housingstock—had been flooded.</p><p> Around that same proportion…Rate This Book|Rate/ReviewAdd To BookshelfGet This BookGo to your preferred retailer, click to choose a format and you' ll be taken directly to their site whereyou can get this book.BookFilter12/1/2015BookFilter | Evernote Web https://www.evernote.com/Home.action#n=35b84d08-3a1c-4166-9556-c5b049621292&ses=4&sh=2&sds=5&2/3 Personalize / Add More ChoicesWhat We SayGary Rivlin arrived after Katrina struck and he's been there ever since, chronicling the disaster, the painfully slowclean-up and pondering the question of whether New Orleans will ever be the same again. (Short answer: no, notreally.) The reporting here is top-notch and Rivlin's take on various players like Mayor Ray Nagin and GovernorKathleen Blanco is convincing.</p><p> If you want a thorough look at what has happened since the man-made levees failedand flooded a city, RIvlin's book gets the job done.</p><p> If it's ultimately a little unsatisfying -- by the end, you feel likeyou're just plodding through yet another community meeting or local council's dragged out decision making -- well,that's perhaps because the recovery itself has proven so unsatisfying.</p><p> You wait and wait for a hero to arrive, for acorner to be turned and it just doesn't come.</p><p> Heroes are found, like local people who find meaning in their lives bybecoming experts on navigating the brave new world of regulations or Liberty Bank CEO Alden McDonald.</p><p> But asfamilies drift apart, the unfair distribution of aid becomes unbearable and the makeup of New Orleans -- you know,the people that live there -- changes forever, it becomes depressing.</p><p> Rivlin offers no narrative that pulls us through.It's a mosiac, with a lot of different voices and the result feels more like discrete tales one after the other.</p><p> There's nocumulative building to success or failure, no through line and by the end we're just as exhausted as the survivors ofthis government incompetence and eventual national indifference.</p><p> That isn't Rivlin's fault but he hasn't somehowturned the lead of Katrina quite into the gold a book needs. -- MIchael GiltzLessWhat Others Say"Gary Rivlin’s sharp eye for detail, grasp of the big picture and thorough reporting reveals the endless errors,egregious official conduct and exploitation that compounded the misery of Katrina victims long after the storm.</p><p> It's ahelluva a book that should arouse every American to demand reform before disasters strike theircommunities."—David Cay Johnston, Recipient of the Pulitzer Prize, author of Divided and Perfectly Legal - “Gary Rivlin is one of our nation's most sharp-eyed cultural observers, and one of our most gifted social historians.Katrina is a provocative and beautifully-rendered book that reminds us that the subject of race is always percolatingbelow the surface.</p><p> The vividly-told and haunting Katrina is vital, not only for understanding New Orleans, and whathappened there over the last ten years, but for understanding how divisions of race and class are perpetuated acrossAmerica today.”—Michael Eric Dyson, author of April 4, 1968 - “The once-great city of New Orleans wasn't destroyed just by a force of nature.</p><p> Along with the hurricane came acategory-5 tsunami of racism, operating at every…MoreWhat You SayFilter byNo Reviews Found .....
