This collection charts the effects of hurricane Katrina upon American cultural identity; it does not merely catalogue the trauma of the event but explores the ways that such an event functions in and on the literature that represents it.

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).

Hurricane Katrina blasted the Gulf Coast in 2005, leaving an unparalleled trail of physical destruction. In addition to that damage, the storm wrought massive psychological and cultural trauma on Gulf Coast residents and on America as a whole. Details of the devastation were quickly reported—and misreported—by media outlets, and a slew of articles and books followed, offering a spectrum of socio-political commentaries and analyses. But beyond the reportage and the commentary, a series of fictional and creative accounts of the Katrina-experience have emerged in various mediums: novels, plays, films, television shows, songs, graphic novels, collections of photographs, and works of creative non-fiction that blur the lines between reportage, memoir, and poetry. The creative outpouring brings to mind Salman Rushdie’s observation that, “Man is the storytelling animal, the only creature on earth that tells itself stories to understand what kind of creature it is.” This book accepts the urge behind Rushdie’s formula: humans tell stories in order to understand ourselves, our world, and our place in it. Indeed, the creative output on Katrina represents efforts to construct a cohesive narrative out of the wreckage of a cataclysmic event. However, this book goes further than merely cataloguing the ways that Katrina narratives support Rushdie’s rich claim. This collection represents a concentrated attempt to chart the effects of Katrina on our cultural identity; it seeks to not merely catalogue the trauma of the event but to explore the ways that such an event functions in and on the literature that represents it. The body of work that sprung out of Katrina offers a unique critical opportunity to better understand the genres that structure our stories and the ways stories reflect and produce culture and identity. These essays raise new questions about the representative genres themselves. The stories are efforts to represent and understand the human condition, but so are the organizing principles that communicate the stories. That is, Katrina-narratives present an opportunity to interrogate the ways that specific narrative structures inform our understanding and develop our cultural identity. This book offers a critical processing of the newly emerging and diverse canon of Katrina texts.

Ten years after Hurricane Katrina, this thoughtful collection of essays reflects on the relationship between the disaster and a range of media forms. The assessments here reveal how mainstream and independent media have responded (sometimes innovatively, sometimes conservatively) to the political and social ruptures "Katrina" has come to represent. The contributors explore how Hurricane Katrina is positioned at the intersection of numerous early twenty-first century crisis narratives centralizing uncertainties about race, class, region, government, and public safety. Looking closely at the organization of public memory of Katrina, this collection provides a timely and intellectually fruitful assessment of the complex ways in which media forms and national events are hopelessly entangled.

The authors of this important text about Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath include Laurence Hudson, Michael Marks, Betty Press, David Reynolds and Linda VanZandt. A decade ago Hurricane Katrina rocked Louisiana, Mississippi, and the whole country. Now Katrina Ten Years After explores the devastation and the aftermath with personal stories and photographs, socio-economic analysis, and tales of rebuilding a community. This book tells the truth about the resiliency of the people of the area, buffeted by not only a storm but by the Great Recession over the last decade. The rebuilding of the area is a reflection of who we are in the South. There was a great amount of generosity, but there were also conflicts between classes and ethnic groups over the spoils of aid funds. Among the chapters is the story of the Lower Ninth Ward's struggle to rebuild, the environmentally concerned salvage business in New Orleans the "Green Project," the efforts of Vietnamese communities to respond to yet again another devastating series of events. We also make use of a unique set of data to analyze the socio-economic struggle to rebuild in the face of the Great Recession, the BP oil spill and attempts by powerful forces to stunt that regrowth. Based on years of work by the authors to conduct interviews with the people in the front lines, many of those interviews available with audio files embedded in the book, this is a story that needs to be told to understand one of the greatest disasters to hit the U.S. and to be prepared for the next "big one."

The aftermath was almost as devastating as the storm itself. In the ten years since Hurricane Katrina hit the Gulf Coast, New Orleans has changed drastically, and The Washington Post returns to the region to take the full measure of the city’s long, troubled, inspiring, unfinished comeback. When Hurricane Katrina hit the Gulf Coast on Aug. 29, 2005, it wrenched more than a million people from their homes and forever altered New Orleans—one of the country’s cultural capitals. It reordered the city’s economy and population in ways that are still being felt today. What changed? And what was lost in the intervening decade? Dozens of Washington Post writers and photographers descended on New Orleans when Katrina hit, and many of those same journalists went back for the anniversary. What they found was a thriving city, buttressed by a new $14.5 billion complex of sea walls, levees, pump stations and outfall canals. What they heard was that, while some mourn the loss of the New Orleans’ soul and authenticity, others—who saw a desperate need for improvement even before the storm—welcome the rebuilding of New Orleans into America’s latest tech hub. This insightful, elegiac eBook, then, is both a backward and forward look at New Orleans’ comeback, full of the voices of those who were pushed by Katrina’s winds in directions they never imagined. “The city, on balance, is far better off than before Katrina,” says Jason Berry, a prolific New Orleans author. “But it’s still a break-your-heart kind of town.”

For many months after Hurricane Katrina, life in New Orleans meant negotiating streets strewn with debris and patrolled by the United States Army. Most of the city was without power. Emptied and ruined houses, businesses, schools, and churches stretched for miles through once thriving neighborhoods. Almost immediately, however, die-hard New Orleanians began a homeward journey. A travelogue through this surreal landscape, A Season of Night: New Orleans Life after Katrina offers a deeply intimate, firsthand account of that homecoming. After the floodwaters drained, author Ian McNulty returned to live on the second floor of his wrecked house without electricity or neighbors. For months his sanity was writing this book on a laptop by candlelight. By turns haunting, inspiring, and darkly comic, this memoir offers a behind-the-headlines story of resilience and renewal. From bittersweet camaraderie in the wreckage to depression and violent rampages in the lawless night to the first flickers of cultural revival and the explosive joy of a post-Katrina Mardi Gras, A Season of Night delivers an unprecedented tale from the wounded but always enthralling Crescent City. Learn more about the book and its author at http://www.seasonofnight.com/