The Great Deluge
Douglas Brinkley
No doubt the definitive volume on Hurrican Katrina has not yet been written. But for the general reader who is looking for a thorough account of this terrible disaster, this book is, in my opinion, the best place to start.
Brinkley wrote the book as a grand timeline. It starts out on the Saturday prior to the hurricane, and hammers out a day-by-day account that ends on Friday, September 2, when the U.S. Army finally showed up to finish the evacuation of the Superdome.
This book is indispensible because Brinkley relies on so many interview sources. Perhaps too many; at times the thread bogs down in personal account after personal account. Yet, in the end, too much information is always better than too little. No one can accuse Brinkley of not doing his research. Since Katrina coverage was marred on a national level by so many inaccuracies, The Great Deluge is very much needed. The record needs to be set straight.
That being said, The Great Deluge suffers from two flaws. First, Brinkley clearly was enraged by the government response to Katrina, and he vents on every page. For the most part, he is right to be angry, but anger can shade objectivity, and objectivity should be the goal of a book of this type. Brinkley clearly hates George W. Bush and New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin. With Nagin in particular he is hyper-critical, even bursting into a half-page tirade when he recounts Nagin taking a half-hour shower in the days after the storm "while thousands suffer. " Admittedly Nagin did not do enough, but to complain about a shower in this circumstance seems a little over the top.
The other flaw is that Brinkley, in concentrating on the train of events during Katrina week, does not sufficiently address the underlying causes. Why was FEMA so ill prepared? Why is it that so many New Orleanians did not have transportation out of town? Why were the levees poorly built and who was responsible for their failure? What is the underlying political and social culture in New Orleans that led to the poverty exposed by Katrina? I had to find the answers to those questions elsewhere.
But as a single wellspring of pure facts, The Great Deluge is the best so far. It is an easy read, and an engrossing one, despite its shortcomings.