Ten years ago, the outside world watched television screens in horror as Hurricane Katrina flooded New Orleans and ravaged the Gulf Coast and other areas in the final days of August 2005. It was the costliest natural disaster in the history of the United States with $108 billion in damages and one of the most deadly hurricanes with at least 1,245 lives lost.
New Orleans took the brunt of it after its levee system failed, flooding most of the city and surrounding areas in what was eventually cited as the worst civil engineering disaster in U.S. history. As people in the area were swept away, trapped on roofs or packed into a convention center with no capacity to take care of them, the response seemed excruciatingly slow and inadequate.
The city’s surviving population was displaced and dispersed. The psychological, economic and social effects of the catastrophic upheaval are perhaps immeasurable, and efforts to rebuild and recover appear to have moved at a snail’s pace, though the area has shown some signs of rebounding.
Numerous books have been written on various aspects of the disaster and its consequences. Diversebooks.net has a number of books for teaching, counseling and general reading topics related to the disaster and recovery.
A Season of Night: New Orleans Life after Katrina, by Ian McNulty, $22.50, (List Price: $25), University of Mississippi Press, July 2008, ISBN: 9781934110911, pp. 176
After the Hurricane Katrina disaster, many of the displaced people began returning to New Orleans to rebuild as the floodwaters receded. Among them was Ian McNulty, a journalist, author and radio personality specializing in Louisiana culture. In the aftermath of the flooding, he lived on the second floor of his ravaged home, bought only a few years before. Lacking electricity like many other returnees, he says he wrote the book by candlelight using his laptop to capture the reconstruction of lives and neighborhoods around him. His memoir documents the devastation to infrastructure, the resilience of the population and the re-emergence of a unique city.
http://diversebooks.net/a-season-of-night-new-orleans-life-after-katrina.html
