Not Just The Levees Broke

Called "one of the rawest specimens of classic Nawlins spitfire you'll ever find" by Newsweek, and featured in Spike Lee's HBO documentary When the Levees Broke, Phyllis Montana-Leblanc gives an astounding and poignant account of how she and her husband lived through one of our nation's worst disasters, and continue to put their lives back together. New Orleans Hurricane Katrina survivor Phyllis Leblanc reveals moment by moment the impending doom she and her family experienced during one of the greatest disasters in contemporary American history. The initial weather forecast, the public warnings from officials, and then the increasingly devastating developments -- the winds and rain, the rising waters -- Not Just the Levees Broke begs the question, What would you do in a life-and-death situation with your family and neighbors facing the ultimate test of character? Not Just the Levees Broke is a portrayal of the human spirit at its best -- the generosity of family, neighbors, and strangers; the depth of love that one can hold for another; the power to help and heal others.

Hurricane Katrina survivor LeBlanc--featured in Spike Lee's acclaimed HBO documentary "When the Levees Broke"--offers an astounding and poignant account of her struggle to survive one of the nation's worst disasters.

Christopher Bigsby explores the potential of television drama to offer a radical critique of American politics, myths and values.

2010 PROSE Award Winner for Nursing & Allied Health Sciences! 2010 AJN Book of the Year Award Winner in Public Interest and Creative Works! "The accounts are vivid, colorful, descriptive, intense, and often horrific and give cross-sectional views of life in the trenches during this disasterÖThis book is a rich primary source for both historians and disaster preparedness planners. It's not only a tribute to the courage of the nurses, but should also serve as a guide for policy planners hoping to avoid less than optimal responses to future crises."--AJN "[T]he book...fascinates simply for its raw documentation of the dreadful events and conditions endured by nurses, doctors, and ancillary staff as they struggled to care for critically ill patients without electricity, running water, air conditioning systems, and other resources. Five years after the levees broke, the horror and chaos of Katrina is still fresh in these accounts. Through the stories, readers are transported into the hospitals as nurses heroically work together to evacuate babies from NICUs and vented patients from ICU, try to calm patients, family members, and coworkers, and make do with the equipment and supplies theyíve got."--National Nurse "Don't ever think that this can't happen to you. You are going to read this and it's going to sound like we created this scenario, but this is a real scenario that happened." --Pam, Memorial Medical Center "Everything that was battery operated eventually died. There were no monitors...we tried to take care of people in the most humane way possible." --Lois, Lindy Boggs Medical Center Nursing in the Storm: Voices from Hurricane Katrina takes you inside six New Orleans hospitals-cut off from help for days by flooding-where nurses cared for patients around the clock. In this book, nurses from Hurricane Katrina share what they did, how they coped, what they lost, and what they are doing now in a city and health care infrastructure still rebuilding, still in jeopardy. In their own words, the nurses tell what happened in each hospital just before, during, and after the storm. Danna and Cordray provide an intimate portrait of the experience of Katrina, which they and their colleagues endured. Just a few of the heroic nurses you'll find inside: Rae Ann and twenty others, including her husband and children, who wait on a hospital roof for help to come Lisa, in the midst of caring for patients, who has not heard from her husband in 5 days Roslyn, who has 800 people in her hospital when the power generators shut down Linda, who uses bed sheets to write out help messages on a hospital roof, hoping someone will see them The book also discusses how to plan and prepare for future disasters, with a closing chapter documenting the "lessons learned" from Katrina, including day-to-day health care delivery in a city of crisis. This groundbreaking work serves as a testament to nurses' professionalism, perseverance, and unwavering dedication.

Winner of the Bancroft Prize Louisiana Endowment for the Humanities Book of the Year A Publishers Weekly Book of the Year “The main thrust of Horowitz’s account is to make us understand Katrina—the civic calamity, not the storm itself—as a consequence of decades of bad decisions by humans, not an unanticipated caprice of nature.” —Nicholas Lemann, New Yorker Hurricane Katrina made landfall in New Orleans on August 29, 2005, but the decisions that caused the disaster can be traced back nearly a century. After the city weathered a major hurricane in 1915, its Sewerage and Water Board believed that developers could safely build housing near the Mississippi, on lowlands that relied on significant government subsidies to stay dry. When the flawed levee system failed, these were the neighborhoods that were devastated. 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 made it easier for white New Orleanians to return home than for African Americans. He explores how the profits and liabilities created by Louisiana’s oil industry have been distributed unevenly, prompting dreams of abundance and a catastrophic land loss crisis that continues today. “Masterful...Disasters have the power to reveal who we are, what we value, what we’re willing—and unwilling—to protect.” —New York Review of Books “If you want to read only one book to better understand why people in positions of power in government and industry do so little to address climate change, even with wildfires burning and ice caps melting and extinctions becoming a daily occurrence, this is the one.” —Los Angeles Review of Books

Ten years after Hurricane Katrina, outsiders will have two versions of the Katrina experience. One version will be the images they recall from news coverage of the aftermath. The other will be the intimate portrayal of the determination of New Orleans residents to rebuild and recover their lives. HBO’s Treme offers outsiders an inside look into why New Orleanians refused to abandon a place that many questioned should not be rebuilt after the levees failed. This critically acclaimed series expanded the boundaries of television making in its format, plot, casting, use of music, and realism-in-fictionalized-TV. However, Treme is not just a story for the outside gaze on New Orleans. It was a very local, collaborative experience where the show’s creators sought to enlist the city in a commemorative project. Treme allowed many in the city who worked as principals, extras, and who tuned in as avid viewers to heal from the devastation of the disaster as they experimented with art, imitating life, imitating art. This book examines the impact of HBOs Treme not just as television making, but in the sense in which television provides a window to our worlds. The book pulls together scholarship in media, communications, gender, area studies, political economy, critical studies, African American studies and music to explain why Treme was not just about television.

“Anyone who is interested in Hurricane Katrina, and in America’s failing infrastructure, will want to read this book . . . a fast-paced narrative.” —Scott G. Knowles, Drexel University 2020 Nautilus Silver Winner In the aftermath of one of the worst disasters in US history, Words Whispered in Water tells the story of one woman’s fight, against all odds, to expose a mammoth federal agency—and win. In 2005, the entire world watched as a major US city was nearly wiped off the map. The levees ruptured and New Orleans drowned. But while newscasters attributed the New Orleans flood to “natural catastrophes” and other types of disasters, citizen investigator Sandy Rosenthal set out to expose the true culprit and compel the media and government to tell the truth. This is her story. When the protective steel flood-walls broke, the Army Corps of Engineers—with cooperation from big media—turned the blame elsewhere. In the chaotic aftermath, Rosenthal heroically exposes the federal agency’s egregious design errors and changes the narrative surrounding the New Orleans flood. This engaging and revealing tale of man versus nature and man versus man is a horror story, a mystery, and David and Goliath story all in one. “Reveals what it takes to hold the powerful to account.” —Publishers Weekly “There are only a few civilians that fight like real warriors. Sandy Rosenthal is one of them.” —Russel L. Honoré, Lieutenant General, United States Army (Ret.)

A rare look at Spike Lee’s creative appropriation of the documentary film genre. In this groundbreaking book, Delphine Letort sheds light on a neglected part of Spike Lee’s filmmaking by offering a rare look at his creative engagement with the genre of documentary filmmaking. Ranging from history to sports and music, Lee has tackled a diversity of topics in such nonfiction films as 4 Little Girls, A Huey P. Newton Story, Jim Brown: All-American, and When the Levees Broke: A Requiem in Four Acts. Letort analyzes the narrative and aesthetic discourses that structure these films and calls attention to Lee’s technical skills and narrative-framing devices. Drawing on film and media studies, African American studies, and cultural theories, she examines the sociological value of Lee’s investigations into contemporary culture and also explores the ethics of his commitment to a genre characterized by its claim to truth. “The Spike Lee Brand makes a very important contribution to scholarly studies on the film-work of Spike Lee [and] places Lee in the pantheon of important social political documentarians such as Claude Lanzmann and Emile de Antonio.” — from the Foreword by Mark A. Reid