Katrina: After the Flood

One of New York Times’s 100 Notable Books of the Year, 2015
One of NPR’s Best Books of 2015

Ten years after Hurricane Katrina made landfall in southeast Louisiana—on August 29, 2005—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—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.

"Sweeping and searching, "Katrina" is a Category Five expose of disastrous disaster relief."-"Florida Courier"

review "Painstakingly researched...Rivlin's reporting allows him to paint deep portraits of his characters and explain relationships...Rivlin does an admirable job keeping the political personal and helping readers understand how deeply and devastatingly Katrina affected everyone in the city...The book is timed to come out a couple of weeks before the 10th anniversary of Katrina, but the timing this summer is equally important as part of the conversation America is currently having on the subject of race relations."-"Miami Herald"

"Gary Rivlin's "Katrina: After the Flood" is as raw as the title.... "Katrina" carries you from the days before the disaster through an aftermath so tumultuous and chaotic you can scarcely fathom it happening in a developed country. Rivlin's careful storytelling won't let us escape, however, as he confronts us with testimonials from streets that remain uninhabited 10 years later."--"Sierra Magazine"

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. He is unerringly compassionate toward his subjects But Rivlin s most valuable journalistic skill is his acute sensitivity to absurdity. He is particularly piqued by the absurdity of racial and economic injustice. "The New York Times Book Review""

One of the must-reads of the season Rivlin offers a good report of what happened during the storm, the bureaucratic snarls and blockages that followed and, most of all, the human cost to all New Orleanians. "The New Orleans Advocate ""

Deeply engrossing, well-written, and packed with revealing stories .a magnificently reported account of life in a broken, waterlogged city .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 "(starred)"

[A] carefully researched, beautifully written book. "San Francisco Bay View ""

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] 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 .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. "Publishers Weekly""

Journalist Gary Rivlin sweeps from street to boardroom in this history of the aftermath As Rivlin sharply reminds, overcoming disasters is very much an issue of governance. "Nature Magazine""

Sweeping and searching, "Katrina" is a Category Five expose of disastrous disaster relief. "Florida Courier""