Hurricane Katrina shredded one of the great cities of the South,
and as levees failed and the federal relief effort proved lethally
incompetent, a natural disaster became a man-made catastrophe. As
an editor of New Orleans' daily newspaper, the Pulitzer
Prize--winning "Times-Picayune," Jed Horne has had a front-row seat
to the unfolding drama of the city's collapse into chaos and its
continuing struggle to survive.
As the Big One bore down, New Orleanians rich and poor, black and
white, lurched from giddy revelry to mandatory evacuation. The
thousands who couldn't or wouldn't leave initially congratulated
themselves on once again riding out the storm. But then the
unimaginable happened: Within a day 80 percent of the city was
under water. The rising tides chased horrified men and women into
snake-filled attics and onto the roofs of their houses. Heroes in
swamp boats and helicopters braved wind and storm surge to bring
survivors to dry ground. Mansions and shacks alike were swept away,
and then a tidal wave of lawlessness inundated the Big Easy.
Screams and gunshots echoed through the blacked-out Superdome.
Police threw away their badges and joined in the looting. Corpses
drifted in the streets for days, and buildings marinated for weeks
in a witches' brew of toxic chemicals that, when the floodwaters
finally were pumped out, had turned vast reaches of the city into a
ghost town.
Horne takes readers into the private worlds and inner thoughts of
storm victims from all walks of life to weave a tapestry as
intricate and vivid as the city itself. Politicians, thieves,
nurses, urban visionaries, grieving mothers, entrepreneurs with an
eye for quick profit at public expense-all of these lives collide
in a chronicle that is harrowing, angry, and often slyly ironic.
Even before stranded survivors had been plucked from their roofs,
government officials embarked on a vicious blame game that further
snarled the relief operation and bedeviled scientists striving to
understand the massive levee failures and build New Orleans a
foolproof flood defense. As Horne makes clear, this shameless
politicization set the tone for the ongoing reconstruction effort,
which has been haunted by racial and class tensions from the
start.
Katrina was a catastrophe deeply rooted in the politics and culture
of the city that care forgot and of a nation that forgot to care.
In "Breach of Faith," Jed Horne has created a spellbinding epic of
one of the worst disasters of our time.
"From the Hardcover edition."
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