The Great Deluge: Hurricane Katrina, New Orleans, and the Mississippi Gulf Coast

"It’s just this amazing snapshot. What Brinkley did so well is capture this remarkable, awful, surreal week in the life of the Gulf Coast. The storm surge hit and destroyed a lot of homes in Biloxi, Gulfport, places in Mississippi along the coast, the ‘Redneck Riviera,’ as some sarcastically call it. So he tells both stories at once. He had a team of people helping him do these interviews and he captured a cross-section of what life was like. He recreates what happened in the Convention Centre, the Superdome [venues where survivors congregated and conditions deteriorated]. He’s an academic, but it’s this really vivid snapshot of those first terrible days and it’s very well-written and very well-told. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter I’ve got nice reviews and it’s been gratifying, but the best feedback I’ve gotten so far is from a woman who’s in my book — black, professional class — who said to me ‘Katrina might be one of the most over-covered stories of our time, thank you because this is the first time I’ve had anyone tell my story.’ Even though we’ve had a lot of great reporting on New Orleans it was played out more as a simplistic narrative: wealthy whites, poor blacks. The black middle class, black professional class, their story was missing. When I went to the Lower Ninth Ward, it was the only place anyone turned me down to talk. There were three or four people who said ‘I’m sorry, I can’t tell this story any more, move on.’ I get that. But when I went into New Orleans East, the second community I focus on, everyone wanted to talk to me because, in a way, no-one had talked to them. Their story was missing. People appreciate that their story is being told."