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Katrina: A History, 1915-2015
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About This Book
The definitive history of Katrina: an epic of citymaking, revealing how engineers and oil executives, politicians and musicians, and neighbors black and white built New Orleans, then watched it sink under the weight of their competing ambitions. Hurricane Katrina made landfall in New Orleans on August 29, 2005, but the decisions that caused the disaster extend across the twentieth century. After the city weathered a major hurricane in 1915, its Sewerage and Water Board believed that developers could safely build housing away from the high ground near the Mississippi. And so New Orleans grew in lowlands that relied on significant government subsidies to stay dry. When the flawed levee system surrounding the city and its suburbs failed, these were the neighborhoods that were devastated. The homes that flooded belonged to Louisianans black and white, rich and poor. Katrina's flood washed over the twentieth-century city. The flood line tells one important story about Katrina, but it is not the only story that matters. Andy Horowitz investigates the response to the flood, when policymakers reapportioned the challenges the water posed, making it easier for white New Orleanians to return home than it was for African Americans. And he explores how the profits and liabilities created by Louisiana's oil industry have been distributed unevenly among the state's citizens for a century, prompting both dreams of abundance--and a catastrophic land loss crisis that continues today. Laying bare the relationship between structural inequality and physical infrastructure--a relationship that has shaped all American cities--Katrina offers a chilling glimpse of the future disasters we are already creating.
Reviews
"Even readers who have never visited the Crescent City will be moved by this incisive account."
"More than just a recounting of the history and aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, it is an argument for the relevance of history itself ..."
"The desire for a conclusive exposition of catastrophe comes from the impulse to comprehend what is impossible to grasp in aggregate."
"the fact that Katrina's impact fell disproportionately on poor Louisianans raises a host of issues that Horowitz addresses better than any previous narrative history of the catastrophe."
"As he convincingly demonstrates, Hurricane Katrina, and the response to destruction, highlighted the complex forces that led to disaster: 'canal building, coastal erosion, climate change, metropolitan subsidence, failed levees, mandatory evacuation, and decades of local, state, and federal housing policy' ..."
"Humanists often overlook the importance of infrastructure when they write social history, but Horowitz vividly illustrates how it shapes life and land around it, in both planned and unplanned ways ..."
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