Breach of Faith: Hurricane Katrina and the Near Death of a Great American City [Hardcover]

Jed Horne (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 1400065526 | ISBN-13: 978-1400065523 | Publication Date: July 11, 2006

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.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Horne, metro editor of the New Orleans Times-Picayune, writes with the clipped, raw urgency of a thriller writer in this humanist account of what happened after the levees broke. As already widely reported, residents who ignored the mandatory evacuation order (thinking "Katrina... had all the makings of a flop") quickly found themselves surrounded by bloated corpses floating in toxic floodwaters and without a consolidated rescue effort. Horne quickly moves past the melodrama of a striking disaster to recount the stories of individuals caught in the storm's hellish aftermath or mired in the government's hamstrung response: a Louisiana State University climatologist goes head-to-head with the Army Corps of Engineers over inadequate flood protection and faulty levees; a former Black Panther provides emergency health care at a local mosque. Horne saves his sharpest barbs for President Bush and the Department of Homeland Security ("if Homeland Security... was what stood between America and the next 9/11, then... America was in deep trouble") for failing to muster an appropriate response. Big disasters spawn big books, and though Horne's isn't the definitive account, it's an honest, angry and wrenching response to a massively bungled catastrophe. (July)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Bookmarks Magazine

Jed Horne, metro editor for the New Orleans Times-Picayune, uses his knowledge of the devastated area to his advantage. In Breach of Faith, he tells some compelling, important stories, despite the amount of coverage that Hurricane Katrina has received over the past year. While the book dutifully describes the events surrounding the disaster, Horne's journalistic skill works against him on occasion. He renders his scenes sharply, if sometimes without passion (as Ceci Connolly puts it, "I found myself yearning for the soul of the Katrina story, the smelly, quirky, gut-wrenching, deadly truth of a city disintegrating"). Most critics find that Horne has created a readable—and sometimes powerful—record of the event.

Copyright © 2004 Phillips & Nelson Media, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 432 pages
• Publisher: Random House (July 11, 2006)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1400065526
• ISBN-13: 978-1400065523
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 6.1 x 1.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.6 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (30 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #833,162 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

35 of 35 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars This is the One You're Looking For, August 19, 2006

By 

Susanne Koenig "mynewwritinglife.blogspot.com" (Memphis, TN) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Breach of Faith: Hurricane Katrina and the Near Death of a Great American City (Hardcover)

You're probably here because you are seeking coverage of this terrible, terrible disaster that is not influenced by ratings. A conscise, easy-to-follow insight that is unaffected, balanced and truthful. This is the book you're looking for.

As I am originally from New Orleans and have loved the city all my life, I was searching for the truth as well. As a full-time shelter volunteer in Mississippi, I realized--real quick--that we weren't getting accurate and unsensationalized reports on the news, save Anderson Cooper. I grew more and more frustrated with cable news, knowing that most reports bore no comparison to what I was hearing from the actual evacuees. Such shenanigans as repeated footage of one poor looted Walgreens over and over again didn't help matters any--not for the evacuees, who looked like criminals, (one thinks of the poor proud woman holding the Huggies up to her face in shame) not for the people who needed help, and certainly not for race relations in America. Anoterh case in point: Gerlado on Fox News holding up a baby on I-10. I would have much rather seen footage of Geraldo looting a Wallgreens in an effort to get some baby formula, but otherwise this parade of news was sadly misreprentative of the actual event and really didn't help anything but the advertisers.

Which is one reason I had such enormous and overwhelming affection for the folks at the Times-Picayune, the vernerable and ancient daily paper of New Orleans. They never, ever missed an issue--not one day, even as the lower floors were flooded. As my specialty in the shelter was helping evacuees with the internet, I repeatedly turned to the Times-Picayune website. It was an accurate and reliable source of information that I and other Orleanians--many who had never sat in front of a computer in their lives--was immensely greatful for.

So with that being said, wouldn't it be great if one of those Times-Picayune guys wrote a book? How about the Metro editor? I mean, until Gerlado comes out with a book on the disaster (of his career) I will recommend this book as your most accurate source of What Really Happened.

Jed Horne, who won the Pulitzer Prize for his work on Katrina has written a well-documented from-the-trenches account of the event. Unlike The Great Deluge (which for some reason seems to keep plugging the title as a name for the event) it is very succinct in its account, and as all good newspapermen do, the prose is pared down to the essentials and easy to follow: I now fully understand the storm's dynamics, and why it was so particularly bad. And less pages, in this case, is much much more. I wrote a favorable review of The Great Deluge, but this is a much better narrative than Briknley's book and thankfully, comes with maps for the dizzying layout of Greater New Orleans plus a map showing the flow of the storm surge, which I found enormously helpful. I found the lack of maps in The Great Deluge inexcuseable--New Orleans--with the winding river is just to difficult to comprehend without one. It doesn't hurt that writing is just so d*** good. Here's a selection from the end of chapter Two, entitled "When Wallyworld Closes at Four", talking about the start of the contraflow:

Within twenty-four hours, mobile signboards would go up at key junctions across the interstate system that converged on Southeast Louisiana, the lettering picked out in flashing amber dots against a black background: NEW ORLEANS EXITS CLOSED. Blink. NEW ORLEANS EXITS CLOSED--and suddenly, a name once evocative of elegance and devil-may-care good times, a haven of sophistication in the hardscrabble South, carried overtones of catastrophe: a Bablon, a Chernoblyl. Blink. NEW ORLEANS EXITS CLOSED.

So, this was the book I had waited for and thankfully, a case of less being decidedly more. And this is the book you have been looking for: truth in action, without a political agenda (such as coming out just before the New Orleans mayoral elections), or a rating concern in sight. I especially appreciated his narrative threads concerning the victims which he skillfully weaves together to form one of the best pieces of journalism I've seen in a long, long time. Brilliant narrative non-fiction, above bar below the levees.

32 of 33 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The Hurricane From Hell Meets The Bureaucracy From Hell, July 11, 2006

By 

C. Hutton "book maven" (East Coast, USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Breach of Faith: Hurricane Katrina and the Near Death of a Great American City (Hardcover)

Only two recent events of this young century have spawned countless books : 9-11 and Hurricane Katrina. The former has the headstart in volume of books written about a man-made disaster. The latter was a hydrid disaster, part nature and part man-made. The title has several meanings. First, the breach of the levees in New Orleans; second, the loss of faith in government on a local, state and federal; and three, the title echoes T.H. White's account of an earlier loss of faith government in "Breach of Faith : The Fall of Richard Nixon" (1975), another story of an earlier loss of faith in government.

The author lived through the hurricane and his writing has an edge of anger at the incompetence throughout the disaster pre-planning and the disaster response. Unlike the much longer (716 pages) "The Great Deluge" by Douglas Brinkley, "Breach of Faith has a narrower focus on New Orleans itself (432 pages). No public figure is spared (the president, the governor, the mayor among others) and Fema is single out above all other governmental for ineptness. Meanwhile, the Coast Guard did an outstanding job preparing for the hurricane and rescuing the residents afterwards. With a "you are there" writing style and countless stories to tell, Mr. Horne does a superb job of telling the story of how a great city nearly died.

22 of 25 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars An Extraordinary, Heartbreaking and Enraging Work of Journalism, July 19, 2006

By 

Louis A. Mandarini (Miami, FL) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Breach of Faith: Hurricane Katrina and the Near Death of a Great American City (Hardcover)

A remarkable page-turner, Jed Horne's "Breach of Faith" has all the elements of the best journalism: vivid reporting, thorough research, fully established human characters, and an ability to boil down a vast breadth of scientific and political detail in accessible and engaging prose.

What makes Horne's book so memorable is the detail. His descriptions of floating bodies beset by water moccasins or the harrowing scene at the Convention Center or the recovery efforts for weeks and months after the storm are simply horrifying. Much of what Horne describes - from the lethal incompetence and sclerotic bureaucracy of FEMA to unrivaled heroism of many heretofore unknown private citizens - rekindles alternating currents of anger and pride in the reader.

To be sure, the canvass on which Horne paints is broad, and the cast of characters for a fairly compact book is long, indeed. Obviously, there are the notable figures of Mayor Ray Nagin, Governor Kathleen Blanco and FEMA Director Michael Brown, but there is also a battery of Lower Ninth Ward residents, Uptown residents and French Quarter residents, firefighters, community activists, doctors, nurses, engineers, former public officials, politicians and others. There are also a number of smaller figures whose stories round out the coverage masterfully. One such figure is a lawyer from Massachusetts who, along with his wife, had been dropping his teenage son off to begin college at Loyola when Katrina struck. Horne's treatment of that lawyer's terrible experience, as well as the incorporation of a pseudo-diary that the lawyer kept throughout the storm and its aftermath, make for electrifying reading. Although it would seem at the outset that keeping track of so many figures would be difficult, Horne makes the characters so memorable - many of their stories so heartbreaking or enraging - that it's ultimately easy to pick up a given person even after a couple of chapters on a different subject.

Horne's chapters on the failure of the levees, and the potential negligence or criminality of the Army Corps of Engineers are excellent. The figure of Ivor Von Heerden, director of LSU's Hurricane Center, emerges in these chapters as an indefatigable seeker of what went wrong with the levees when, how and why. Later chapters on the effect of decades of corruption and cronyism at the various parish levee boards, coupled with the political efforts to merge those boards, do a nice job of showing how politicians in Louisiana have tried to turn around the lethal situation and rebuild. In particular, Governor Blanco emerges as a much more sympathetic and forward-thinking politician than she has been portrayed anywhere before, during or after the storm. Horne's treatment of Blanco is refreshing, if only because of the vicious smears she so often suffered during and immediately after the storm from the Republican noise machine that was so loudly trying to vindicate the Bush administration abysmal response.

In sum, Horne's book is likely to stand for a long time as the best account of the effects of Katrina, and is highly recommended reading.