Breach of Faith: Hurricane Katrina and the Near Death of a Great American City
Author: Jed Horn
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 aneye 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.
Library Journal
The New Orleans Times-Picayune's staff (including metro editor Horne) won Pulitzer Prizes for its coverage of Katrina. Such esteem is deserved, as Horne here demonstrates. His on-the-ground narrative emphasizes his ear for local idiom and his sharp eye for compelling detail. Although the various scenes sometimes swirl around in a fashion less organized than Katrina itself, Horne connects the horrors of the storm with relevant backstories very effectively. Copyright 2006 Reed Business Information.
Kirkus Reviews
Agonizing, in-the-trenches retelling of Hurricane Katrina and her catastrophic consequences. With masterful precision, Horne, metro editor of New Orleans' Times-Picayune, offers an insider's tour through each phase of the August 2005 disaster, from the storm's first churnings to the final casualty toll, estimated at 1,100 (hundreds still remain missing nine months later). The author's exhaustively comprehensive account is studded with profiles of southeast Louisiana residents who survived the tempest (barely), despite an ambivalent city bureaucracy that failed to gel in time to prevent the "collapse of social order" after the levees broke. Sparing no detail, Horne's exhaustive hour-by-hour account beholds a drowned city barren of electricity, potable water, edible food and outside aid, further traumatized by looters, shootings and the bumbling ineptitude of ill-prepared federal agencies like FEMA. Horne recounts the frustration of those healthy enough to undertake the mandated pilgrimage to higher ground, only to be met and shot at by armed policemen who turned them back. Thousands waded through water teeming with poisonous snakes, bacterial microbes and human and animal corpses floating face down. Tempering the pandemonium are the author's powerful human-interest profiles: the heroic efforts of DSS workers within the stifling Superdome's putrid conditions, corpse-hunting EMTs, sapped-out news media and Fats Domino, who, though wealthy, still resides in New Orleans' working-class Lower 9th Ward. The author goes on to cite Katrina as a "man-made disaster" because of its careless handling. Most jarring of all, though, are the conspiracy theories held by the lower-river residents whobelieve the thunderous sounds heard during the hurricane was dynamite deliberately set to detonate the levee, thus protecting the wealthier white population up-river. Dense chapters of maddening political finger-pointing ensue, delivering an appropriate conclusion to "the multilateral and continuing fiasco that was Katrina."A heart-wrenching chronicle of nature's wrath and the human condition.
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Ida: A Sword Among Lions
Author: Paula J Giddings
In the tradition of towering biographies that tell us as much about America as they do about their subject, Ida: A Sword Among Lions is a sweeping narrative about a country and a crusader embroiled in the struggle against lynching: a practice that imperiled not only the lives of black men and women, but also a nation based on law and riven by race.
At the center of the national drama is Ida B. Wells (1862-1931), born to slaves in Mississippi, who began her activist career by refusing to leave a first-class ladies' car on a Memphis railway and rose to lead the nation's first campaign against lynching. For Wells the key to the rise in violence was embedded in attitudes not only about black men but about women and sexuality as well. Her independent perspective and percussive personality gained her encomiums as a hero -- as well as aspersions on her character and threats of death. Exiled from the South by 1892, Wells subsequently took her campaign across the country and throughout the British Isles before she married and settled in Chicago, where she continued her activism as a journalist, suffragist, and independent candidate in the rough-and-tumble world of the Windy City's politics.
In this eagerly awaited biography by Paula J. Giddings, author of the groundbreaking book When and Where I Enter, which traced the activist history of black women in America, the irrepressible personality of Ida B. Wells surges out of the pages. With meticulous research and vivid rendering of her subject, Giddings also provides compelling portraits of twentieth-century progressive luminaries, black and white, with whom Wells worked during some of the mosttumultuous periods in American history. Embattled all of her activist life, Wells found herself fighting not only conservative adversaries but icons of the civil rights and women's suffrage movements who sought to undermine her place in history.
In this definitive biography, which places Ida B. Wells firmly in the context of her times as well as ours, Giddings at long last gives this visionary reformer her due and, in the process, sheds light on an aspect of our history that is often left in the shadows.
The Washington Post - Glenda Elizabeth Gilmore
Despite a long and influential career in journalism, social work and politics, Wells has not received the recognition she deserves. She left an unfinished autobiography, and other authors have dealt with her activism in various contexts. Giddings set out to write a definitive biography and has succeeded spectacularly. Ida gradually brings us to see the world through Wells's eyes; as she shops for a new seersucker suit that we know she can't afford or feels betrayed when fellow activists try to leave her off the list of founders of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, we come to love this brave and wise woman. Read it and weep. Then give it to the last person who told you that ideals are a waste of time.
The New York Times - Richard Lingeman
Paula Giddings's devoted and scrupulous biography is not the first study of this pioneering woman, but it is a comprehensive work that attempts to portray her as part of the progressive movement that emerged among the black bourgeoisie in post-bellum America.
A.O. Edmonds <P>Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. - School Library Journal
Giddings (Afro-American studies, Smith Coll.; When and Where I Enter) has written a massive study of this noted black activist's lifelong crusade against lynching. Prodigious research took Giddings to more than 30 archives; 100 pages of notes and bibliography attest to the depth of her scholarship. The result serves as a definitive biography of Wells. Giddings argues that her subject was a leading feminist as well as a crusader for civil rights. She explores Wells's optimism in the face of numerous setbacks, including ostracism from her home city of Memphis. The author concludes that Wells's unflinching focus on opposition to lynching ultimately was adopted by the NAACP as a central tenet, which helped lead to the NAACP's success as a civil rights organization. Much more complete than previous studies of Wells, e.g., by James West Davidson, Idais well written and painstakingly detailed. Highly recommended for all academic and major public libraries.
Kirkus Reviews
Massive biography of an important yet little-known figure in American civil-rights history. Giddings (In Search of Sisterhood: Delta Sigma Theta and the Challenge of the Black Sorority Movement, 1988, etc.) attempts to rescue from obscurity anti-lynching activist Ida B. Wells (1862-1931). Born into slavery in Mississippi, Wells grew up during the brief post-Civil War period of political and social ascension in which blacks, particularly black women, challenged policies that segregated the races in public places and kept African-Americans out of the voting booth. In the1880s, a series of gruesome lynchings, described by the author in graphic, horrifying detail, ended the illusion that the South had progressed much and propelled Wells to action. In editorials, speeches and pamphlets distributed throughout the United States (and eventually England), she maintained that only equal rights would end lynching-and, even more controversially, that black Americans deserved civil rights simply because they were human. That position put her at odds with less radical members of the antiracist movement, including many women's suffrage groups and nationally prominent figures like Booker T. Washington, who held that blacks must move beyond ignorance and poverty and embrace bourgeois values before they could earn the rights enjoyed by white Americans. Throughout her life, Wells existed on the outskirts of African-American activism, alienating potential allies and estranging erstwhile friends such as Frederick Douglass. Although she is a fascinating woman, this book suffers from her biographer's lack of selectivity. Giddings spares no detail or scrap of salvaged paper, however obscure or immaterial. Asidesabout conflicts within the black women's club movement go on for chapters, and Wells's early love life, including lengthy quotes from her suitors' letters, gets far more space than it merits. Despite such overreporting, the author fails to explain how this remarkable figure disappeared from history, a glaring oversight in a text that takes pains to explore its subject's long and colorful life from every angle. Exhaustive-indeed, sometimes exhausting-but with a key piece missing. Agent: Lynn Nesbit/Janklow & Nesbit Associates
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