Rising From Katrina

Bay St. Louis, Mississippi, was the former home of CNN correspondent Koch. Here the veteran reporter chronicles how her hometown lost it all and found what mattered.

Hundreds of manuscripts, interviews, and transcripts were collected from students and other residents who were willing to share their personal stories of the disaster. UNO compiled all of the submissions and created The Katrina Archive, which is currently housed at the University of New Orleans library. Voices Rising is a small sampling of this greater collection.

Beyond Katrina is poet Natasha Trethewey’s very personal profile of her natal Mississippi Gulf Coast and of the people there whose lives were forever changed by Hurricane Katrina in 2005. Trethewey’s attempt to understand and document the damage to Gulfport started as a series of lectures at the University of Virginia that were subsequently published as essays in the Virginia Quarterly Review. For Beyond Katrina, Trethewey expanded this work into a narrative that incorporates personal letters, poems, and photographs, offering a moving meditation on the love she holds for her childhood home. In this new edition, Trethewey looks back on the ten years that have passed since Katrina in a new epilogue, outlining progress that has been made and the challenges that still exist.

Voices Rising II is the second book created from the archives of The Katrina Narrative Project, a sweeping enterprise by the University of New Orleans to collect diverse accounts and histories from Louisiana citizens who endured Hurricane Katrina in 2005. Culled from hundreds of manuscripts, audio recordings and interviews housed at the University of New Orleans Library, the stories provide an exceptional record for the understanding and study of collapse and reorganization, disaster and recovery.

"Tremendous. Canney describes how a service smaller than the New York City police department was able to rise to the occasion with near perfect execution of its missions."---Vincent W. Patton III, Master Chief Petty Officer of the U.S. Coast Guard (retired) --

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 in the making, Gary Rivlin’s Katrina is “a gem of a book—well-reported, deftly written, tightly focused….a starting point for anyone interested in how The City That Care Forgot develops in its second decade of recovery” (St. Louis Post-Dispatch). On August 29, 2005 Hurricane Katrina made landfall in southeast Louisiana. A decade later, 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 area’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 as a staff reporter for The New York Times. Four out of every five houses had been flooded. The deluge had drowned almost every power substation and rendered unusable most of the city’s water and sewer system. 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? “Deeply engrossing, well-written, and packed with revealing stories….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 Reviews, starred review). Katrina tells the stories of New Orleanians of all stripes as they confront the aftermath of one of the great tragedies of our age. This is “one of the must-reads of the season” (The New Orleans Advocate).

"Lost in Katrina is powerful! It is the human experience during the worst storm in America's history. Mike Schaefer has captured the stories of those who not only miraculously survived, but went on to become heroes." --Angela Hill, WWL-TV anchor, New Orleans "Mike Schaefer listens. And because he listens so well, we get to hear the real stories of Katrina and St. Bernard Parish. I've seen the aftermath there with my own eyes and thought what must it have been like when the storm hit, when the floods came? Now we know. And what a story." --Harry Smith, CBS News "When friends ask me what Katrina was really like, this is the book I'll recommend to them. The individual stories Mike tells, of survival and loss, desperation and heroism, perfectly capture the unreal chaos that was Katrina. Even if, like I did, you think you know all about the storm and its aftermath, you'll find something new, and, no doubt, inspiring, in this book." --Tracy Smith, CBS News correspondent This book offers insightful, emotional accounts of life before, during, and immediately after Hurricane Katrina in a parish that seemingly disappeared from the government's sight. While President Bush was shaking hands with FEMA director Michael Browne ("Brownie," as he will long be remembered) on the fourth day after the storm, St. Bernard Parish was struggling to salvage what they could. As the rest of the world watched the worst of humanity emerge on television, ordinary people did extraordinary things to save the parish that found itself almost completely submerged in floodwater. Heart-wrenching stories of the human will to survive offer an inside perspective on what it means to be a survivor of Hurricane Katrina.