A review by mllejoyeuxnoel
The Great Deluge: Hurricane Katrina, New Orleans, and the Mississippi Gulf Coast by Douglas Brinkley

4.0

I picked this book out of the many accounts of Katrina because it appeared to be the most comprehensive and widely-read - and at over 600 pages, comprehensive it certainly was. Still, reading this 2006 book in 2022, when the Katrina response has for many years now been almost universally acknowledged as the epitomic result of systemic, institutionalized racism, was disheartening at many points. I also wasn’t crazy about the chronological way the history of the storm and its aftermath was written. It felt like the author was trying to fit literally every single story he’d ever recorded into one book, which sometimes resulted in very strange jumps from one moment to the next; still, as chaotic and unwieldy as the story of Katrina is, I must admit I don’t have any suggestions for how it should have otherwise been organized. Overall, I’m glad I read this book. I was 17 when Katrina hit, busy applying to colleges and in so many co-curriculars that it was exceedingly rare for me to be home from school in time for the nightly news, so I had only the broadest understanding of what happened during the week’s worth of time this book covers. For the factual timeline and anecdotal accounts of survivors, this book was great. I learned a lot.