We Hold Our Breath

Developed as the commercial hub of the Texas cotton and sugarcane industries, Houston was designed for profit, not stability. Its first residents razed swamplands into submission to construct a maze of highways and suburbs, giving the city a sprawling, centerless energy as storms and floods rattled coastal Texas.

When Hurricane Harvey made landfall in 2017, Fields set off from his home in Iowa back to the battered city of his childhood to rescue his mother. Fields tracks the devastation of Hurricane Harvey, one storm in a long lineage that threatens the fourth largest city in America.

Fields depicts the history of Houston with reverence and lyrical certainty, investigating the conflicting facets of Texan identity that are steeped in racial subjugation, environmental collapse, and capitalist greed. He writes of the development of the modern city in the wake of the destruction of Galveston in 1900; of the oil booms and busts that shaped the city; of the unchecked lust for growth that makes Houston so expressive of the American dream.

We Hold Our Breath is a portrait of a city that exists despite it all, a city whose story has always been one of war waged relentlessly against water.