How hard it is to face the truth how hard it is to stay in a room

books:


	• The Great Deluge: Hurricane Katrina, New Orleans, and the Mississippi Gulf Coast Douglas Brinkley Harper Perennial, 2007 - 768 pages average customer review:based on 118 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

Review of "The Great Deluge"

Every literate citizen of Louisiana should take the time to read Douglas Brinkley's book, "The Great Deluge" before any forthcoming election, (local or national), and ask the difficult questions of the prospective candidates how they would react in similar circumstances and what action they would take to preclude a similar event in the future. There is plenty of blame to go around for that disaster and Brinkley is not shy about directing it where it should be cast. An excellent and very written book. It's worth the time to read from cover to cover.The Great Deluge: Hurricane Katrina, New Orleans, and the Mississippi Gulf Coast

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How hard it is to face the truth how hard it is to stay in a room

Brinkley's facts are confirmed by contemporaneous news reports and videos available on YouTube. Furthermore, New Orleans was written off because the white people with cars got out, and black and white people so feckless as to not have cars don't count in America. They are left to die alone, and then explode all over their pathetic homes in the heat, as was my neighbor during the Chicago heat emergency of 1995 because so many people in America don't count.

Go ahead and hate your neighbor, go ahead and cheat your friend. Go ahead, and post silly lists of grammar mistakes and run your stupid yap about "liberal agendas". Go ahead and generalize from your service in some military unit reluctantly and slowly detailed to help out, give us your worm's eye view, soldier, boast a little, you may even have the right.

But please don't say it didn't happen. And then don't say they deserved it.

Brinkley's book documents discoveries reminiscent of what Allied soldiers discovered in WWII: death camps.

"Brownie" (Michael Brown, the joke who was appointed head of FEMA) at least tried to do his job, this book documents. The real villains are as usual "flag rank", whose personal coldness is evident, to a frightening degree in reports of their conduct when not on camera and in their eyes when on. What they do to their wives speaks volumes. Can't trust 'em.

Many people reading these reviews work BELOW a bright line in American society which in the last twenty years is crossed, is risen above, only when you demonstrate the ability to (1) find the people who count, who have money and power and (2) write off the rest. It happens in little software development groups and it happens in the large.

Ask yourself, why wasn't Chertoff let go after Katrina? Why wasn't he fired? Why wasn't he outsourced? There's probably more compassion in India.

THE ONES IN POWER WHO KILL PEOPLE DO NOT ADMIT GRIEF. THEY WILL NOT STAY IN A ROOM WITH A DYING BABY. THEY WILL NOT SPEND THE DAYS IT CAN TAKE.

- Jenny Holzer, MOTHER AND CHILD

The conceptual artist Jenny Holzer inscribed those words in 1990.

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Brinkley gets much of the story correct

I just reread this book after two years. My first time around I was skeptical how insightful a book could be so soon after Katrina. On my second go round with The Great Deluge, I was impressed by how much of the story Brinkley got right.

* The New Orleans Police Department was as dirty, corrupt and unprofessional as ever. The breakdown of the force was incomprehensible.

* Mayor Ray Nagin was a weak and shallow man with little leadership skills besides self-promotion.

* Governor Blanco was an earnest but overwhelmed figure who didn't understand her own state government well enough in order to harness resources before and after the hurricane.

* FEMA Director Brown was a lightweight political appointee who should have never been in such a key position. However, to his credit he did seem to realize early on that he would need help from above to manage the recovery process.

* Homeland Security Chief Chertoff showed a total inability to process important information, thus completely misreading the situation and failing to alert his boss to the massive mobilization the situation demanded.

* President Bush, who put people like Chertoff and Brown in jobs for which they they were ill-equipped.

If you're looking for more detailed information on specific aspects of Katrina, other books may provide better reading. However, if you want to read one book that gives you an overall perspective on what happened and why, then Brinkley's book is the one to read.

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reviews: page 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10

In the span of five violent hours on August 29, 2005, Hurricane Katrina destroyed major Gulf Coast cities and flattened 150 miles of coastline. But it was only the first stage of a shocking triple tragedy. On the heels of one of the three strongest hurricanes ever to make landfall in the United States came the storm-surge flooding, which submerged a half-million homes?followed by the human tragedy of government mismanagement, which proved as cruel as the natural disaster itself.

In The Great Deluge, bestselling author Douglas Brinkley finds the true heroes of this unparalleled catastrophe, and lets the survivors tell their own stories, masterly allowing them to record the nightmare that was Katrina.

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