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Title details for Katrina by Gary Rivlin - Available

Katrina

After the Flood

by Gary Rivlin
Johnny Heller
Audiobook
1 of 1 copy available
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1 of 1 copy available
Ten years after Hurricane Katrina made landfall in southeast Louisiana, 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 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—80 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.

  • Creators

  • Publisher

  • Release date

    May 10, 2016

  • Formats

    • OverDrive Listen audiobook

      • ISBN: 9781504720137
      • File size: 445049 KB
      • Duration: 15:27:11

  • Languages

    • English

  • Reviews

    • AudioFile Magazine
      Johnny Heller's strong voice lends authority to veteran journalist Rivlin's detailed account of the events and people who shaped--and were shaped by--the nation's response to the destruction of Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans. Rivlin's braided stories begin the day after the flood in 2005 and end with the sentencing of former Mayor Ray Nagin in 2014. It is not an inspiring tale, but there are heroes as well as villains and examples of persistence and wisdom to match the stories of incompetence and corruption. 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. F.C. © AudioFile 2016, Portland, Maine
    • Publisher's Weekly

      June 15, 2015
      A decade after Hurricane Katrina wreaked unprecedented destruction upon New Orleans, journalist Rivlin (Broke, USA) looks back at the fall and rebuilding of the Big Easy. It’s 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—including politicians, businessmen, and everyday residents—over the course of many years. Rivlin addresses the city’s history leading up to Katrina’s landfall, examines how the hurricane transformed the region, and then settles in for the long, arduous rebuilding process. He doesn’t pull punches as he looks at the political, economic, and social aspects of New Orleans’s struggle to recover, nor does he shy away from the complicated racial themes that have always been a part of the city’s history. Rivlin writes from firsthand experience as a journalist first sent to report on the storm’s immediate aftermath, and he skillfully balances out the human elements with concrete details of the devastation and the reconstruction that has followed. For those interested in how New Orleans came to the brink of destruction and slowly fought its way back to become a thriving, even improved, metropolis, this is certainly a work worth checking out. Agent: Elizabeth Kaplan, Elizabeth Kaplan Literary Agency.

Formats

  • OverDrive Listen audiobook

subjects

Languages

  • English

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