Katrina

After the Flood

Gary Rivlin

• Publisher: Simon & Schuster
• Year: 2015
• eBook ISBN: 9781451692266
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: History

Ten years in the making, Gary Rivlin’s Katrina is “a gem of a book—well-reported, deftly written, tightly focused….a starting point for anyone interested in how The City That Care Forgot develops in its second decade of recovery” (St. Louis Post-Dispatch).

On August 29, 2005 Hurricane Katrina made landfall in southeast Louisiana. A decade later, 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 area’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 as a staff reporter for The New York Times. Four out of every five houses had been flooded. The deluge had drowned almost every power substation and rendered unusable most of the city’s water and sewer system. 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?

“Deeply engrossing, well-written, and packed with revealing stories….Rivlin’s exquisitely detailed narrative captures the anger, fatigue, and ambiguity of life during the recovery, the centrality of race at every step along the way, and the generosity of many from elsewhere in the country” (Kirkus Reviews, starred review). Katrina tells the stories of New Orleanians of all stripes as they confront the aftermath of one of the great tragedies of our age. This is “one of the must-reads of the season” (The New Orleans Advocate).

Table of contents

• Cover
• Dedication
• Epigraph
• Maps of New Orleans
• Author’s Note
• Prologue
• Chapter One: The Banker
• Chapter Two: Air Force One
• Chapter Three: Behind Enemy Lines
• Chapter Four: A First Burst of Optimism
• Chapter Five: The Shadow Government
• Chapter Six: Looking the Part
• Chapter Seven: Cassandra
• Chapter Eight: He Said, She Said
• Chapter Nine: Rita
• Chapter Ten: Brick by Brick
• Chapter Eleven: Blue Sky
• Chapter Twelve: Shrink the Footprint
• Chapter Thirteen: Isle of Denial
• Chapter Fourteen: Look and Leave
• Chapter Fifteen: A Smaller, Taller City
• Chapter Sixteen: Limbo
• Chapter Seventeen: Chocolate City
• Chapter Eighteen: The Mardi Gras Way of Life
• Chapter Nineteen: Darkness Revealed
• Chapter Twenty: Road Home
• Chapter Twenty-One: “You'll See Cranes in the Sky”
• Chapter Twenty-Two: Eight Feet Across
• Chapter Twenty-Three: Fatigue
• Chapter Twenty-Four: Vanilla City
• Chapter Twenty-Five: Blight
• Chapter Twenty-Six: The Sore Winner
• Chapter Twenty-Seven: Return to Splendor
• Chapter Twenty-Eight: “Get Over It”
• Epilogue
• Acknowledgments
• About the Author
• Notes on Sources
• Index
• Copyright