Katrina: After the Flood

by Gary Rivlin

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).

Genres: Nonfiction, History, Politics, American History, Race, Audiobook, Environment

481 pages, Kindle Edition

First published August 11, 2015

Reviews

[Rebecca · Rating 3 out of 5]

Ten years later, the scale of the destruction wrought by Hurricane Katrina still seems staggering. At Category 5, it was the third strongest storm ever documented in America, with a six-meter storm surge and winds up to 175 mph. The devastation covered 90,000 square miles, caused $80 billion in damages, and took 1,800 lives. Fans of Five Days at Memorial will want to continue the story with this thorough journalistic look at Katrina’s years-long aftermath. Rivlin profiles dozens of ordinary people who were affected, from disgraced mayor Ray Nagin right down to evacuees.

One warning, similar to what I’ve said about Fink’s huge book: this is overfull of names, dates, events and statistics. It’s a great big whack of information, and you’ll need to have a strong interest in the history of New Orleans to sustain you. This is why I only skimmed the book. Luckily, though, Rivlin is a great storyteller, and I appreciated his take on the “hidden blessings of New Orleans’s near-death experience.”

(For those interested in the topic, this photographic tour through abandoned New Orleans is eye-opening.)

[Wendy · Rating 5 out of 5]

I have been reading this book for the past three days and even though it brought back some horrible memories about what we all went through during and after Hurricane Katrina this is the only book that I've read that has really captured the whole truth about this time in my life. I remember everything Gary Rivlin wrote in this book. It was truly incredible what a wonderful job he did with this. I don't have to ever read anything else and know that what I know now at the ten year anniversary of Hurricane Katrina that there is anything else that I need to know after reading this book. Thank you Mr. Rivlin for doing such a thorough job of writing and researching this. Although I don't think this is the kind of book to bring anyone to tears at the end of it I did cry.

[David Webber · Rating 2 out of 5]

This book is mostly about the politics and social/racial aspect of the recovery. Very little detail on the process of recovery, long-term economic analysis, engineering improvements and infrastructure. Read only if you are interested in Mayor Nagin and all the other policy makers and recovery committees involved. Not the most interesting part of the recovery story of New Orleans if you ask me.

[Jason Stanley · Rating 5 out of 5]

It’s hard to believe that it has been ten years since Katrina rolled through New Orleans and other parts of the Gulf. It also marked ten years since Rita left her mark on southwest Louisiana. The focus has always been on New Orleans, perhaps because of the storm that followed in Katrina’s wake.

In his new book, Katrina: After the Flood, journalist Gary Rivlin portrays the dysfunction, the politics, and the blatant racism that followed the storm. On assignment for The New York Times, Rivlin spent most of the year after Katrina living in New Orleans and Baton Rouge. In that time, he put his attention on “the mess ahead.” This is reflective in his writing.

The book begins when Katrina landed in August of 2005. As I read just the first few chapters, I was struck by the level of inhumane decisions that were chosen. Based on what, exactly? Fear? Uncertainty? Racism? I felt sick reading the stories that open this book.


And perhaps that is the response that Rivlin wanted from his readers. A sense that this should not be happening anywhere, and especially not in the United States. As Rivlin builds his narrative from his own reporting, interviews, and the reporting of others, we begin to see the back story that reveals the real storm that became known as Katrina.

Read more at http://jasoncstanley.com/book-review-...

[Laura · Rating 3 out of 5]

This sweeping work looks at the recovery (or lack thereof) in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina. Although the cast of characters sometimes seemed a bit too large to keep track of, Rivilin did a good job of bringing everything together at the end. This was a sad account, full of tales government ineptitude and neglect, that was ultimately brightened by the actions of individuals doing what they could to fill the needs they saw in their community.

[Douglas Bessette · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is awful to say but one of the best things to come out of the Katrina disaster was all the great books about New Orleans (and Katrina). This is one of those great books. The perfect amount of narrative, data and perspective. A fantastic and enthralling read, and a must for anybody interested in New Orleans.

[Megan Nigh · Rating 4 out of 5]

One of the best non-fiction works I have ever read. Heartbreaking. There was so much I learned that I had never realized before I read this book. Shows the very best of people and also the very worst brought about by this man-made disaster. A must-read.

[Lucie Cavaroc · Rating 3 out of 5]

I'd like to thank Simon and Schuster for sending me this book in exchange for my review. This was a very hard book for me to read. Having lived through Katrina, and having my own "after the flood" stories worthy of being entered into Rivlin's book, I was reluctant to read about others' misery. I had avoided all of the 10-year anniversary coverage on TV, and then the book arrived on August 29, I have to applaud Rivlin on the ambitious scope of research and material found within this endeavor. I have lived in New Orleans all of my life and learned a lot from reading this book. I do believe that many of us living here after Katrina were too numb to the news and preoccupied with rebuilding our lives to know what was going on around us, politically. Some of the material was too raw and gut-reaching to say that I enjoyed reading this book, but it was definitely a broadening experience. It was intricate in detail, but made me wonder if anyone outside of New Orleans would be interested in reading about the tiresome politics of the city. I wish I had been able to read it before it was printed because I did find several annoying errors, which I will report and that will hopefully be corrected before the second printing.

[Christina · Rating 2 out of 5]

I won a free copy of this book through the Goodreads giveaway program. I had expected it to cover the entire impacted region, but the book just focuses on New Orleans. This should have been clearer from the title.

What I liked about the book – the author does a good job of documenting the sheer incompetence and negligence of the various government administrations, mainly at the mayoral level and the presidential level. The mayor and president were too busy playing party politics to really care about the outcome for the average people in the city. It was disgusting and shameful. The mayor was also eventually convicted of fraud and embezzlement. Much of the true rebuilding of the city came from the local community, mainly people who loved their neighborhoods and wanted to help people rebuild. They received outside grants, but without their action and dedication, many areas would still be in poor condition. The areas with the more involved citizens were the ones to recover the quickest.

What I disliked about the book – the author seemed to have a strong bias, and much of the book had declarations of racism. However, it seems too easy and simplistic to blame everything on racism. Were there any other issues, such as socio-economics, at play? New Orleans, like many large cities, didn’t have much middle class in the city core, so were issues exacerbated by the fact that it was predominately either upper class or lower class? While there were definitely racial issues on both sides, more exploration on the class aspects of the recovery should have been included. Many of the interviewees in the book were at the extremes – ‘wealthy white businessman who also had a house in Vail’ and ‘former Black Panther party member’. Not many people are going to relate to either one. It may have been determined that extremism made for a more interesting book.

[Annie · Rating 3 out of 5]

Reading Sheri Fink’s Five Days at Memorial last month has given me a strange fascination for Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath. When I saw Gary Rivlin’s Katrina: After the Flood listed on NetGalley for review, I leapt at the chance to read it. The book chronicles the nearly ten years that have passed since Katrina destroyed New Orleans and the Gulf Coast. I read it because I wanted to know what’s happened to the city since it’s faded from the national conscience. Katrina: After the Flood is written in roughly chronological order, detailing 2005 through about 2007 before leapfrogging up to the present. Rivlin, a journalist who has written for The New York Times and WIRED, among other national publications, follows dozens of New Orleanians from the mayor’s intimates to activists to bank CEOs to ordinary homeowners to show a full picture of the devastation of the city and its long, unfinished journey to recovery...

Read the rest of my review at A Bookish Type. I received a free copy of this book from NetGalley for review consideration.

[Sherri Smith · Rating 4 out of 5]

I received this book as part of the GOODREADS FIRST READ contest and couldn't be more pleased to have won it! It's a book I would have gladly paid money for!!

Once I picked it up, it was SO compelling that it was difficult to put down. The stories and views that were on the news during the Katrina situation could not adequately describe portray the situation; this book takes you inside!

I don't want to spoil this read for anyone else because it really is an emotional journey! All I can say is that this is a book I believe everyone should pick up and read!

SO glad I received this as part of the GOODREADS FIRST READ contest!!

[Leanna · Rating 5 out of 5]

I’ve always enjoyed visiting New Orleans, but at the same time, I have always felt like it is somewhat dysfunctional compared to other large cities I’ve visited. I now understand some of the history as to why I have had that feeling.
I liked the way the author weaved in personal stories about wealthy and no so wealthy individuals and how they were affected at this time. He put a face and a personality on the events taking place and what this did to the individuals during this time. The dismal recovery efforts sounded horrendous for all.

I really appreciated how the writer gave a behind the scenes reporting of the progress and then also highlighted what the media was covering.

[Casey · Rating 4 out of 5]

What a feat. This book is so thorough and, for much of it, so readable. It does eventually become overwhelming. I couldn't keep track of all of the characters after a while. And I didn't care enough to try to back read to re-find out who they were. There are lots of paragraphs that didn't really need to be in here. A leaner book would've been five stars for me. But it certainly is an impressive amount of reporting. I learned a lot about my home state, about the federal government and local politics. I would really recommend it

[Erin · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of my top 3 books of 2015. Incredible, amazing, heartbreaking. I think I read 50% of it out loud to my husband because I was so appalled at what I was reading. An in depth look at everything that happened during and after Katrina in terms of recovery. I liked the exposes of the politicians involved and also the close-up looks at several individuals and business owners and how they were faring. I felt like I knew the people by the end. Really knew who they were. Highly recommend.

[Della Wiedel · Rating 5 out of 5]

Very engrossing. The book details the roles of several key players, local politicians and business owners from New Orleans, as well as local families, in the struggle to rebuild in the years after Hurricane Katrina. I found the first hand accounts gave me a new perspective of what it was like for the people who lived through this whole ordeal. I felt that there was a good discussion of politics, history and geography to help understand why things happened the way that they did.

[Bekah Harper · Rating 4 out of 5]

I was in 5th grade when Hurricane Katrina happened. Although I knew that the U.S. government had a horrific response, I didn't know many details. This book does an excellent job detailing the horrors of the aftermath of Katrina by following a few key players as they try to rebuild. This book is dense in its discussion of local politics but excellent in painting the larger picture of how racism and sheer neglect impacted the rebuilding of one of America's greatest cities.

[Amanda · Rating 3 out of 5]

Exhaustive, unsentimental, fine-grained. Written with an outsider’s understandable perplexity toward Louisiana politics, and a pointed awareness of racial inequity that I hoped would develop into a more full-throated condemnation. There are heroes and villains in this book, and some of them help the reporting come alive— I would’ve liked more of their energy animating it’s pages.

[Matt Lanza · Rating 4 out of 5]

A good read to help better understand New Orleans in the aftermath of Katrina. The racial and socioeconomic tension, the personalities, the fall of Ray Nagin, the extreme differences in how some neighborhoods moved on and others did not and how the government and city elites willed it along or fought it. Probably a required reading to understand post-Katrina New Orleans.

[Jen · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a must read about the bureaucratic and political aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. Was glad to read the stories of neighbors bonding together to make progress but also quite disgusted at the political infighting that left residents with little to no help for years after the hurricane.

[Erin Ewing · Rating 4 out of 5]

This took a beat to get into because of the sheer amount of people you have to learn and follow at the beginning, but once I got the hang of the gang, I could focus on the story and it truly was fantastic journalism. Moving, gutting, and sometimes hopeful. Rivlin exposes all the flaws, confusion, and incompetency that we met Katrina with as a nation and it’s incredibly powerful and frustrating.

[Jason · Rating 3 out of 5]

More so than any contemporary or recent historical gaffe or tryst, the Bush White House's inaction after Katrina will be remembered as the biggest presidential screwup of the modern era. It was the moment where Bush's incompetence and GOP Svengali Karl Rove's psychopathy were most apparent, and, even in hindsight, there's no excusing it. Yet, as this book makes clear, failings after Katrina were exclusive neither to the Republican Party nor to the Federal Government as plenty of blame can be placed on both Governor Blanco and Mayor Nagin for their egos, their politics and, in the latter case, their mental state. Some readers might think the author is biased as Blanco initially comes off way better than Bush and Nagin. Maybe but portraying someone as more competent than those two is damning with faint praise, and Blanco eventually gets hers in these pages. Partisan? Possibly. Accurate? Certainly.

The book itself is fascinating but arguably too comprehensive. With far too many supporting characters, Rivlin's account becomes both repetitive with those characters' common fates and incomprehensible with their overlapping timelines. However, when they're able to be quickly identified, many of the characters' stories are memorable and compelling. Belabored bank president Alden McDonald's is arguably the most interesting, but many of the stories work well here. What the book does best, however, is delving into the tricky subject of race. Although some may argue otherwise, Rivlin claims and successfully supports the theory that there was a concerted effort in the aftermath of the storm to rebuild the city with far fewer low-income blacks. The implications of this are horrifying and yet this book makes it seem that, at least on some level, this is what was going on as the Lower 9th Ward and New Orleans East languished in squalor as the rest of the city became inundated with financial aid and high priced consultants. Even if conspiracy theories about the government actually demolishing the levees aren't true (which they're almost certainly not), this revelation is awfully damning. For this alone, the book is well worth reading even if its too-wide scope makes it less approachable than it otherwise might have been.

[Brad · Rating 5 out of 5]

The aftermath of Katrina is a tough story to tell in 430 pages, but Rivlin does a respectable job throwing as much as he can at you without letting it get overwhelming. What I really appreciate about this book is how the author really lays bare the racial gap in the recovery - white people and people with money came out well, poor people and minorities were often not given enough support to rebuild their homes and lives, and the changes this disparity has wrought on the city are extremely visible today to a casual observer. This was, in many cases, deliberate, and Rivlin pulls no punches making that clear. So while there are things I would have liked to have seen hashed out a bit more (St. Bernard Parish's blood relative ordinance and ban on multifamily housing for one), I think this is a very honest accounting and tells the truth in a way that a lot of authors would probably shrink from in their efforts to find a happy ending that does not actually exist.

[Alexis · Rating 5 out of 5]

Katrina: After the Flood is perhaps one of the best non-fiction books I've read in a long time. When I picked it up initially, I thought based on the description that it would be a factual account of the days, months, and years following the hurricane. While it did offer a factional account of events, the real story ended up being a series of human interest tales woven around the events and politics that surrounded the flood. I thought that Rivlin chose his characters well and that they represented a broad spectrum of people, and neighborhoods, after the storm. The prose was well-written and the story ended up being an all encompassing page-turner that I didn't put down all weekend. If anything, it's inspired a new love for the city that culture around my home revolved around throughout my youth. I know from family members that Katrina changed New Orleans, but I haven't been since the storm. I will go now with more context for what I see.

[Alan Chong · Rating 2 out of 5]

While Rivlin is a tireless documenter of facts, events, and political turns in post-Katrina New Orleans, there was no real coherent, focused narrative of the events, nothing to tie these things together except for a chronology, or proposed cause and effect. No doubt, the post-Katrina debacle was almost as damaging as the storm itself, and the book clearly maps out the administrative and political failures that caused it, so if you want to know about these, it's an important book. But the idea that the recovery efforts was a complete s^&%show becomes evident about 20 pages in, and without a more moving, central theme or focus, it just becomes more and more of the same.

[Barbara · Rating 4 out of 5]

Densely packed with information, this book is a rough ride through treacherous waters. Highly readable, politically intriguing, depressingly familiar. The tragedy that transformed a city also transformed many, many lives. Nothing about the animals, though; this one is about the impact of by on humans.

[William Lopez · Rating 5 out of 5]

Excellent book that brings the reader into both the physical aftermath of Katrina as well as the political turmoil that resulted. Rivlin deftly illustrates the complex issues of race, class, and political will that came in the wake of Katrina.

A book good on its own, but certainly relevant given the current pandemic.

[Anna · Rating 3 out of 5]

I was a little disappointed. This book was well researched but it spent too much time on meetings and discussions of how to restore New Orleans. I really wanted more of a narration of what happened to the residents during the years of recovery and that seemed to be thrown in as an afterthought.

[Michele · Rating 3 out of 5]

Lots of interesting information but it was very disjointed and I couldn't keep all the players straight.

[gwen g · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a really powerful, detailed book about Katrina. Also depressing as hell.

[sticky fruit · Rating 5 out of 5]

extremely insightful, i truly learned so much about NOLA before and after the storm.