Breach of Faith: Hurricane Katrina and the Near Death of a Great American City

I feel this book gives a unique perspective from someone who has the skills to relay the story in a readable fashion. As a person who is living in Baton Rouge, I can tell you what he says is more straightforward than most of the stories and articles I've read and heard to date. What I can add to his story is this: some of the reason why many did not leave New Orleans prior to Hurricane Katrina that nobody has mentioned so far. Within a year and a half prior to the Katrina, New Orleans citizens had been asked to evacuate the city no less than (approximately) three times because of other storms that had appeared to be heading to the city, but at the last minute had taken a different track. To evacuate this often is an expensive and difficult thing to do for folks living paycheck to paycheck with limited income. Hurricane Katrina was just one of the many "storms of the century" that appeared to be making a beeline for New Orleans. Other storms, including Hurricane Ivan, had turned at the last moment. Several years of this, including one storm just some years ago which had the same potential as Katrina, but as it made landfall dropped from a category 3 to a category 1 (or 2, I can't remember which)-can cause many folks to begin to ignore the message. Many folks were under the impression this was just another over-calculation by the authorities. After all, they had dodged the bullet many many times in the last thirty-odd years. After Hurricane Katrina moved out of Louisiana and the winds begin to drop and with the power out, a friend and I ventured forth to find a store or drive thru open to get something to eat. It was then we noticed a number of folks in cars packed to the gills with their belongings and kids parked at closed gas stations or wherever they could find some type of cover or protection from the rain and winds. We realized then many of these folks had jumped in their cars and fled their homes during the early hours of the storm, only to find shelters filled and the winds too strong to drive once they pulled into Baton Rouge. It was some time later when many folks found out they didn't have a home to return to. And that in some cases, they had fled at the very last minute before the flood waters. Others simply waited too late. Like the story of Chicken Little or The Boy Who Cried Wolf, what was said may happen, finally happened. Sadly, by then, many were no longer listening. This book by Mr. Horne is the best so far I've read (regarding the events before, during and after Hurricane Katrina). It is a book I am recommending to out-of-state (and in state) friends and family. He puts the picture in the mind of the reader and gives a first hand perspective of the experience of those who were most effected by Hurricane Katrina.

You're probably here because you are seeking coverage of this terrible, terrible disaster that is not influenced by ratings. A conscise, easy-to-follow insight that is unaffected, balanced and truthful. This is the book you're looking for. As I am originally from New Orleans and have loved the city all my life, I was searching for the truth as well. As a full-time shelter volunteer in Mississippi, I realized--real quick--that we weren't getting accurate and unsensationalized reports on the news, save Anderson Cooper. I grew more and more frustrated with cable news, knowing that most reports bore no comparison to what I was hearing from the actual evacuees. Such shenanigans as repeated footage of one poor looted Walgreens over and over again didn't help matters any--not for the evacuees, who looked like criminals, (one thinks of the poor proud woman holding the Huggies up to her face in shame) not for the people who needed help, and certainly not for race relations in America. Anoterh case in point: Gerlado on Fox News holding up a baby on I-10. I would have much rather seen footage of Geraldo looting a Wallgreens in an effort to get some baby formula, but otherwise this parade of news was sadly misreprentative of the actual event and really didn't help anything but the advertisers. Which is one reason I had such enormous and overwhelming affection for the folks at the Times-Picayune, the vernerable and ancient daily paper of New Orleans. They never, ever missed an issue--not one day, even as the lower floors were flooded. As my specialty in the shelter was helping evacuees with the internet, I repeatedly turned to the Times-Picayune website. It was an accurate and reliable source of information that I and other Orleanians--many who had never sat in front of a computer in their lives--was immensely greatful for. So with that being said, wouldn't it be great if one of those Times-Picayune guys wrote a book? How about the Metro editor? I mean, until Gerlado comes out with a book on the disaster (of his career) I will recommend this book as your most accurate source of What Really Happened. Jed Horne, who won the Pulitzer Prize for his work on Katrina has written a well-documented from-the-trenches account of the event. Unlike The Great Deluge (which for some reason seems to keep plugging the title as a name for the event) it is very succinct in its account, and as all good newspapermen do, the prose is pared down to the essentials and easy to follow: I now fully understand the storm's dynamics, and why it was so particularly bad. And less pages, in this case, is much much more. I wrote a favorable review of The Great Deluge, but this is a much better narrative than Briknley's book and thankfully, comes with maps for the dizzying layout of Greater New Orleans plus a map showing the flow of the storm surge, which I found enormously helpful. I found the lack of maps in The Great Deluge inexcuseable--New Orleans--with the winding

A remarkable page-turner, Jed Horne's "Breach of Faith" has all the elements of the best journalism: vivid reporting, thorough research, fully established human characters, and an ability to boil down a vast breadth of scientific and political detail in accessible and engaging prose. What makes Horne's book so memorable is the detail. His descriptions of floating bodies beset by water moccasins or the harrowing scene at the Convention Center or the recovery efforts for weeks and months after the storm are simply horrifying. Much of what Horne describes - from the lethal incompetence and sclerotic bureaucracy of FEMA to unrivaled heroism of many heretofore unknown private citizens - rekindles alternating currents of anger and pride in the reader. To be sure, the canvass on which Horne paints is broad, and the cast of characters for a fairly compact book is long, indeed. Obviously, there are the notable figures of Mayor Ray Nagin, Governor Kathleen Blanco and FEMA Director Michael Brown, but there is also a battery of Lower Ninth Ward residents, Uptown residents and French Quarter residents, firefighters, community activists, doctors, nurses, engineers, former public officials, politicians and others. There are also a number of smaller figures whose stories round out the coverage masterfully. One such figure is a lawyer from Massachusetts who, along with his wife, had been dropping his teenage son off to begin college at Loyola when Katrina struck. Horne's treatment of that lawyer's terrible experience, as well as the incorporation of a pseudo-diary that the lawyer kept throughout the storm and its aftermath, make for electrifying reading. Although it would seem at the outset that keeping track of so many figures would be difficult, Horne makes the characters so memorable - many of their stories so heartbreaking or enraging - that it's ultimately easy to pick up a given person even after a couple of chapters on a different subject. Horne's chapters on the failure of the levees, and the potential negligence or criminality of the Army Corps of Engineers are excellent. The figure of Ivor Von Heerden, director of LSU's Hurricane Center, emerges in these chapters as an indefatigable seeker of what went wrong with the levees when, how and why. Later chapters on the effect of decades of corruption and cronyism at the various parish levee boards, coupled with the political efforts to merge those boards, do a nice job of showing how politicians in Louisiana have tried to turn around the lethal situation and rebuild. In particular, Governor Blanco emerges as a much more sympathetic and forward-thinking politician than she has been portrayed anywhere before, during or after the storm. Horne's treatment of Blanco is refreshing, if only because of the vicious smears she so often suffered during and immediately after the storm from the Republican noise machine that was so loudly trying to vindicate the Bush administration abysmal response. In sum, Horne's

This is an amazing book. The author has interviewed a bunch of people from different backgrounds, and found out not just what happened to them but how they felt along the way, what things looked like from their perspective (rooftop, Dome, etc.). There are tons of great little details, like snakes and flying insects and a confused Fats Domino thinking he was playing a concert at the Dome, and a much-needed perspective on why this kind of thing was able to happen. The result feels almost like a novel, except that we know this stuff really happened.

Only two recent events of this young century have spawned countless books : 9-11 and Hurricane Katrina. The former has the headstart in volume of books written about a man-made disaster. The latter was a hydrid disaster, part nature and part man-made. The title has several meanings. First, the breach of the levees in New Orleans; second, the loss of faith in government on a local, state and federal; and three, the title echoes T.H. White's account of an earlier loss of faith government in "Breach of Faith : The Fall of Richard Nixon" (1975), another story of an earlier loss of faith in government. The author lived through the hurricane and his writing has an edge of anger at the incompetence throughout the disaster pre-planning and the disaster response. Unlike the much longer (716 pages) "The Great Deluge" by Douglas Brinkley, "Breach of Faith has a narrower focus on New Orleans itself (432 pages). No public figure is spared (the president, the governor, the mayor among others) and Fema is single out above all other governmental for ineptness. Meanwhile, the Coast Guard did an outstanding job preparing for the hurricane and rescuing the residents afterwards. With a "you are there" writing style and countless stories to tell, Mr. Horne does a superb job of telling the story of how a great city nearly died.