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Sign up todayKatrina
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Learn moreTen years after Hurricane Katrina made landfall in southeast Louisiana, journalist Gary Rivlin traces the storm’s immediate damage, the city of New Orleans’ efforts to rebuild itself, and the storm’s lasting effects 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.
Much of New Orleans still sat under water the first time Gary Rivlin glimpsed the city after Hurricane Katrina. Then a staff reporter for the New York Times, he was heading into the city to survey the damage. The Interstate was eerily empty. Soldiers in uniform and armed with assault rifles stopped him. Water reached the eaves of houses for as far as the eye could see.
Four out of every five houses—eighty percent of the city’s housing stock—had been flooded. Around that same proportion of schools and businesses were wrecked. The weight of all that water on the streets cracked gas and water and sewer pipes all around town, and the deluge had drowned almost every power substation and rendered unusable most of the city’s water and sewer system.
People living in flooded areas of the city could not be expected to pay their property taxes for the foreseeable future. Nor would all those boarded-up businesses—21,000 of the city’s 22,000 businesses were still shuttered six months after the storm—be contributing their share of sales taxes and other fees to the city’s coffers. 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?
This book traces the stories of New Orleanians of all stripes—politicians and business owners, teachers and bus drivers, poor and wealthy, black and white—as they confront the aftermath of one of the great tragedies of our age and reconstruct, change, and in some cases abandon a city that’s the soul of this nation.
Gary Rivlin, an investigative reporting fellow at The Nation Institute, is a former New York Times reporter and the author of five books, including Katrina: After the Flood and Broke, USA: From Pawnshops to Poverty, Inc.—How the Working Poor Became Big Business. His work has appeared in The New York Times Magazine, Mother Jones, GQ, and Wired, among other publications.
Johnny Heller has recorded over eight hundred titles and won multiple Earphones Awards and four prestigious Audie Awards. He one of AudioFile’s Top 50 Narrators of the Twentieth Century and was awarded a Golden Voice Lifetime Achievement Award in 2019.
Reviews
“Rivlin, one of our finest journalists, chronicles it all in superb and riveting detail. This is something we have to know, discuss and absorb—before the next storm comes along.”
“The vividly-told and haunting Katrina is vital…for understanding how divisions of race and class are perpetuated across America today.”
“As with the finest works of journalism, Rivlin’s book deploys the tools of his trade to illuminate the segment of history he examines.”
“Once upon a time, this tour might have ended more cheerfully, with John Kennedy Toole’s weird and wonderful novel A Confederacy of Dunces.”
“Rivlin’s valuable book is among the first to relate, in clear and scrupulous detail, the decisions that have brought us this far and to identify those who made them…Rivlin is a sharp observer and a dogged reporter.”
“Rivlin sweeps from street to boardroom in this history of the aftermath.”
“A gem of a book—well-reported, deftly written, tightly focused.”
“Rivlin’s reporting allows him to paint deep portraits of his characters and explain relationships.”
“Deeply engrossing, well-written, and packed with revealing stories…A magnificently reported account of life in a broken, waterlogged city.”
“A sprawling, epic tale, filled with cold numbers and heartbreaking scenes of loss and devastation. It’s also an insightful, accessible saga that follows a wide cast of participants…He skillfully balances out the human elements with concrete details.”
“Raises important questions about the role of race in the response to natural disasters.”
“Johnny Heller’s strong voice lends authority to veteran journalist Rivlin’s detailed account…Heller is an accomplished narrator. His performance is as compelling as the forest of details will allow. The aftermath of Katrina is one of the most important American case studies of the twenty-first century.”
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