Gary Rivlin's Reading List

"It focusses on right before, during, and months after the disaster. It’s got two characters. I feel obligated in my book to talk about the president and the mayor and the governor and local officials. What I love about a novelistic treatment is that there are two characters: one is a white, alternative weekly editor. The other character is a black man from the Lower Ninth Ward who ends up in Houston. It was interesting for me because I was reporting on life in Houston. If you were rescued from New Orleans, the odds were good that you ended up in Houston. At least 100,000 people from New Orleans ended up in Houston, which is a huge number. So I read quotes, and I talked to a few people. But there was something about him spending half a book with this one man as he was trying to get his mind around the fact that he lost everything, that his home was practically destroyed, his possessions, all his keep sakes. Now he’s dealing with it perched in Houston in a hotel or a couch and is slowly trying to rebuild his life. He captured so well the strangeness of life there. You have to rebuild a life knowing that your greatest hope is that you’re going to destroy that life and get back to New Orleans. You can’t just sit in Houston indefinitely. So it’s about these two people trying to figure out how to do what’s best for them while meanwhile everyone else, from the president to the governor to the mayor on down, hasn’t a clue. Tom, who I met once — very nice man, great writer — does a nice job of weaving in the bigger story on the outside, of the indecision, while really focussing on these two human beings struggling to figure out what happened and what they need to do now."

"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."

"It’s written with this brawling spirit, you feel the frustration on every page. To remind you, 25,000 people weren’t picked up at the Superdome — a place that ran out of food and water two or three days before, and was medically overwhelmed — for five days. Buses didn’t show up at the Convention Centre until day six, where another 20,000 people were and where there were no provisions. That incredible frustration, anger, and confusion is captured in the book. It’s written from the point of view of New Orleanians watching these bankers and CEOs that the mayor appointed after the flood decide whether to rebuild all of the city. For example, they were waiting on the federal government for flood elevation maps, because if you want flood insurance — which you need — they were not going to give it to you unless you abided by the rules. It took them eight months to make that map. Meanwhile, people were trying to live their lives. There were two periods. There was that first week, and then there was the next nine years eleven months. A little over half the book is that first week, and then it starts reporting on the following months. Once the water had receded and the National Guard had taken control, 80 per cent of the city was covered in water, the schools were destroyed, the utilities were destroyed, there was no 911, no police, no business, what do you do? How do you rebuild? Jed starts that story."

"It’s interesting you say that, because after the disaster people said it was all about race. I don’t doubt there would have been a difference between 50,000 black folks trapped in New Orleans versus 50,000 mostly white people in Orange County. I’m not saying race isn’t a factor. But ideology was a big factor too. When Bush was a candidate he gave Bill Clinton credit for turning around FEMA [the Federal Emergency Management Agency]. It became this amazing agency, it was finally being run by a professional, somebody who understood emergency management rather than a political appointee. But then the Bush administration came in and they believe in smaller government. One way to shrink the size of the government was to cut funding to FEMA, so they demoted the agency to a cabinet level — which made a big difference, it didn’t have the ear of the president any more, it had to go through an intermediary — and on top of that it had a much smaller budget. To me, ideology played a big role. What I love about Disaster is that it’s co-written by two Wall Street Journal reporters. They tell the story through Homeland Security, through FEMA. They look at this disaster from the perspective of the apparatus that was supposed to be in place to rescue people. It’s rich with stories. Michael Brown [the then head of FEMA], who was hung out to dry by the Bush administration and, in everyone’s minds, is to blame for the botched response, actually comes off looking pretty well in the book. He’s not perfect but he was made a scape goat. A lot of other people made big mistakes too. There was a lot of political infighting. “I’m not saying race isn’t a factor. But ideology was a big factor too.One way to shrink the size of the government was to cut funding to FEMA.” You really feel with this book like you’re in the rooms where decisions are being made. You’re in the rooms when the wrong decisions are being made. It’s just two good reporters who did a good job of telling an important story. We need to understand what happened, why mistakes were made and maybe, hopefully, the people running FEMA have now read the book and can learn from it. New Orleans is much safer today than it was at the time of Katrina. It has a $14.5 billion flood protection system. Some complain, but it’s a really good system. FEMA, though, it can’t change. There are rules our government came up with rules, our Congress passed them, our president has signed them that say you have to go through these steps. There are regulations that have been created and so everything takes longer than you think. The city of New Orleans and FEMA are still negotiating today, ten years later, over how much money the city is owed for Katrina. It’s just endless. One of my favourite anecdotes in the book is this guy in City Hall who works out how he wants to spend some discretionary recovery money. He sends it to the state and the state sends back a flowchart eight feet long. This guy said ‘it took us eight months to get the first two feet.’ If you thought anything was going to take six months it meant it was going to take six years. There literally were ambulances at the parish lines that FEMA wasn’t letting in because some regulation hadn’t been satisfied. That’s a time when rules don’t exist."

"I can’t tell you how much I fell in love with this book. Some of it is timing in my life. I was in San Francisco, working for the New York Times covering Silicon Valley and my phone rang. I was asked to go to New Orleans and a journalist friend of mine said ‘you should read this book.’ It was the first book I read. It’s just so splendidly written. This guy is a geographer, he didn’t really know New Orleans when he got there, but he falls in love with it and just captures it. He doesn’t fetishise it like many others, he really captures what makes it unique: the architecture, the accents, the culture, the blending of French, Spanish, Haitian, free people of color, the jazz. He does such a great job of chronicling that. But there were little seeds of worry for this city in this book when it first came out in 1976. Then he comes back in 2003, which happens to be two years before Katrina, and it’s a frightening portrait. He’s watching as this city is building more and more on former swamp land, which is very dangerous. There are 96,000 people living in New Orleans East, almost all of them African American. They feel like they’re living the dream, but you read his book and you see they’re buying swamp land. Lewis is very angry no-one’s talking about the great risk of living there. He has this great line, that the elevator changed the New Yorks and Londons of the world, allowing you to build vertically, and the wood pump — invented in the late-nineteenth century — transformed New Orleans. It gave humans the arrogance to build on anything. Swamp land is five feet below sea level. They turned it into an expensive sub-division and sold the houses for a few hundred thousand dollars. It was such an interesting experience for me to be reading this book while the city was debating whether to rebuild the whole city or tell certain low-lying communities that they can’t rebuild. It’s such a complicated question, and he acknowledges it. What makes me like his book is that it addresses race. The African Americans weren’t given the opportunity to have home ownership until the 1970s, by which time all of the high ground in New Orleans was taken. So, by saying we’re not going to rebuild these low-lying neighbourhoods you’ve just told eighty percent of the city’s African American population that you’re not rebuilding their neighbourhoods. This book has a geographer’s perspective on a story that is all about geography. Fifty percent of the place is below sea level. One or two feet below sea level is ok, it leads to a little flooding in the street, but five or more feet and we’re talking about communities under water and that’s what happened after Katrina. New Orleans was swamped, there were ten feet or more of water in parts of New Orleans East. It’s prophetic, though it wasn’t a deliberate warning. There started to be a lot more urban problems, crimes and tensions. New Orleans is the Deep South. When they integrated the schools in 1960 that changed the shape of the city. 150,000 or so whites left because it would mean that their children would have to go to integrated schools. So a city that was two-thirds white was two-thirds black by the time of Katrina. That’s the backdrop that’s occurring while Lewis is writing this book. It changed the economics of the city. It became a poor city, there was less money invested in the schools. Even the whites who stayed tended to be uptown with money and would send their kids to private schools, parochial schools. There’s a defunding of the public schools system that was over ninety percent African American at the time of Katrina. He captures this in the two editions. The really interesting thing about New Orleans that I really understood after reading this book was that it’s an absolutely preposterous place to put a city. It’s low lying, it’s got terrible bugs, six months of the year it’s got to worry about hurricanes. But if you didn’t have a New Orleans there, you’d have to build a city because it’s the port of this amazingly important river, the Mississippi, which touches something like thirty states in the country. It’s essential that there be a port city there. So that contradiction is the book: It makes no sense to build a city there but they did, and let’s see what it’s like."