Customer Reviews

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

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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.

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.

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.

I feel this book gives a unique perspective from someone who has the skills to relay the story in a readable fashion. As a person who is living in Baton Rouge, I can tell you what he says is more straightforward than most of the stories and articles I've read and heard to date.

What I can add to his story is this: some of the reason why many did not leave New Orleans prior to Hurricane Katrina that nobody has mentioned so far. Within a year and a half prior to the Katrina, New Orleans citizens had been asked to evacuate the city no less than (approximately) three times because of other storms that had appeared to be heading to the city, but at the last minute had taken a different track. To evacuate this often is an expensive and difficult thing to do for folks living paycheck to paycheck with limited income. Hurricane Katrina was just one of the many "storms of the century" that appeared to be making a beeline for New Orleans. Other storms, including Hurricane Ivan, had turned at the last moment. Several years of this, including one storm just some years ago which had the same potential as Katrina, but as it made landfall dropped from a category 3 to a category 1 (or 2, I can't remember which)-can cause many folks to begin to ignore the message. Many folks were under the impression this was just another over-calculation by the authorities. After all, they had dodged the bullet many many times in the last thirty-odd years.

After Hurricane Katrina moved out of Louisiana and the winds begin to drop and with the power out, a friend and I ventured forth to find a store or drive thru open to get something to eat. It was then we noticed a number of folks in cars packed to the gills with their belongings and kids parked at closed gas stations or wherever they could find some type of cover or protection from the rain and winds. We realized then many of these folks had jumped in their cars and fled their homes during the early hours of the storm, only to find shelters filled and the winds too strong to drive once they pulled into Baton Rouge. It was some time later when many folks found out they didn't have a home to return to. And that in some cases, they had fled at the very last minute before the flood waters. Others simply waited too late. Like the story of Chicken Little or The Boy Who Cried Wolf, what was said may happen, finally happened. Sadly, by then, many were no longer listening.

This book by Mr. Horne is the best so far I've read (regarding the events before, during and after Hurricane Katrina). It is a book I am recommending to out-of-state (and in state) friends and family. He puts the picture in the mind of the reader and gives a first hand perspective of the experience of those who were most effected by Hurricane Katrina.

I had heard many good things about this book and wanting to learn more about what happened behind the headlines decided to check it out of the library.

Each chapter covers a topic: Media, Healthcare, Education, Politics, etc. So in the beginning I found it very interesting to read about what happened in New Orleans leading up to Katrina and right after Katrina. While covering the overall topic in each chapter, Horne also provides one personal account to make it real for the reader.

Then he got into the engineering and levee logistics and I found the book hard to follow. Not that it wasn't interesting to learn about what caused the flood and what they were doing (or not doing) to make it better for future years, but for a visual person it was very hard to follow.

Overall, I flew through the first couple of chapters riveted and then slowed down tremendously to get to the end. However, if you are really interested in learning more about Hurrican Katrina I would still recommend this book.

This is an amazing book. The author has interviewed a bunch of people from different backgrounds, and found out not just what happened to them but how they felt along the way, what things looked like from their perspective (rooftop, Dome, etc.). There are tons of great little details, like snakes and flying insects and a confused Fats Domino thinking he was playing a concert at the Dome, and a much-needed perspective on why this kind of thing was able to happen. The result feels almost like a novel, except that we know this stuff really happened.

Of the several Katrina related books out there, this book is my favorite for articulating skillfully not only the human tragedy and devastation of a City but the aftermath such as the real cause of the levee failures, the failed government response and the political conflicts both local and federal that delayed rebuilding. The tragic, sudden displacement of humans and loss of life and the struggle to survive is well told but what makes this book different is that the author seems to be very objective in evaluating the government failures at all levels that include the issues of federal flood insurance and bailouts. Included is the insurance industries reaction to home owners that had no flood insurance. The great debate, well written in newspapers nationally, is about whether the damage was truly wind related, covered, or flood related, not covered. The federal political outlook also lends its compass to the Bush administration, which is described as questioning financial bailouts to home owners that in their opinion neglected to buy insurance. Certainly FEMA comes into play as the author notes that flood zone maps by FEMA were not up to date and one of the fascinating points in the book is how and why the levees failed. In addition, how FEMA spent money recklessly allowing gouging by the unscrupulous and paying $70,000 for trailers instead of $67,000 FEMA homes is a conundrum worth exploring. The author makes a fascinating point that the Netherlands looked to the U.S, years ago to see how to design levees and pump stations and after Katrina the role is reversed. The political tumble between Bush and Blanco is very interesting and the impression one has is that neither is innocent but there is understandable concerns about just giving money to Louisiana with its reputation of extreme patronage. But as the author notes, Blanco learns to play hard ball with the President and congress and her idea of a single, professional levee board, instead of the numerous fractured versions that represented the various parishes, is an idea that she plants and virtually wins. The author offers a good view of the question about fair play between Bush and Blanco that is not fully answered but Mississippi does well in contrast and whether it was because it was a red State or just had a better organized governor still lends itself to question. Of course there is the development battle of where to rebuild, make public parks out of the high risk areas or rebuild complete neighborhoods right back in potentially exposed areas? The author also gives you all full story of the fractures of New Orleans, the collapse of the NOPD and Nagin political and government gaffes such as "chocolate City" remarks (didn't go over well in New Orleans either) but I found the engineering forensics and design issues of the failed levees most fascinating. The author lets the levee story break through in timed intervals and then in the last chapter all the facts come together. Well written, concise yet informative with little rancor but good reporting. Interesting poke, the author refers to the author of another best seller as a "Gonzo journalist" that went over the top in his book.

Horne's book about Katrina and its aftermath is just outstanding.

I am a resident of the French Quarter with more than a passing interest in the subject. I had read and really enjoyed Douglas Brinkley's book, The Great Deluge, about the first seven days of the disaster. I enjoyed Horne's book even more because he covered that time period in sufficient though not as extensive detail and adds what happenned later through February of 2006.

There is something for everyone here. Horror, shock, pathos, disgust, political intrigue, amazement, some humor, etc. It is a real page turner.

This is one of the better non-fiction books that I have ever read, and I've read a lot of them.

Unqualified recommendation, two thumbs way, way up.

"Breach of Faith" begins and ends with an African-American family headed by a disabled mother. In between we read about seemingly non-stop government incompetence - preparations just prior to the storm, reaction immediately afterwards, faulty levee construction years before, and political conniving and bumbling even months afterwards.

The initial material reports on families deciding whether to stay or flee - decisions impacted by availability of transportation and friends, fear of looting if they leave, and prior hurricane threats that failed to materialize. Then a quick summary of damage - about 3,000 fishing boats and thousands of acres of oyster beds that were pulverized - some 60 years old, a 27-food storm surge, 220,000 damaged residences - about 75,000 beyond reclamation, 50,000 flooded cars, and 1,100 deaths.

The Superdome offered respite to tens of thousands, with its 70,000 seats and air-conditioning. Unfortunately, it had no food or water, its air-conditioning and lighting failed during the storm, and it became a hot, fetid pig-sty and its discomforts were acerbated by National Guard troops that initially prohibited people inside from going outside. Many elderly suffering from various serious medical conditions were dumped by nursing homes or their families, and staff quickly ran out of supplies and even forms to follow those in their care.

FEMA had one person in New Orleans - he e-mailed photos from the Dome throughout Sunday afternoon to FEMA headquarters, along with information about urgent needs (eg. medical oxygen). That evening the wind tore of two vents, peeled off sheets of rubberized weatherproofing, and undoubtedly scared many inside when the lights failed. Rampant (mostly false) rumors of sordid crimes further added to the terror.

FEMA's man relayed information regarding the 17th St. Canal breech at 11 A.M. Monday, and spoke to Michael Brown at 7 P.M., informing him of the other breeches. At about the same time Governor Blanco called President Bush, telling him "We need everything you've got!" (This plea was later criticized for lack of specificity - however, "Breach of Faith" makes it clear that detail was not possible at that time, due to downed communications and restricted accessibility.

The "good news" is that Governor Blanco had previously deployed the state's Wildlife and Fisheries boats to the area, and encouraged volunteer boats to join in rescue operations. The "bad news" is that FEMA prohibited volunteer boats from coming into the city, denied a request for 1,000 rubber rafts to help rescue victims ("might be debris in the water"), told the Florida Airboat Association (traditional hurricane responders) not to come because it was "unsafe," told volunteer medical doctors to stop providing aid (because they were not registered with FEMA), ignored the Department of Interior - with its hundreds of boats, and ignored the USS Bataan hospital ship nearby - despite its ability to provide 100,000 gallons of safe water, 600 hospital beds, and six operating rooms. (The fact that 5 of the top 10 FEMA posts were filled with people without disaster experience didn't help.)

"Breach of Faith" also adds new understanding to the "bus issues" - by the time it became clear that they were needed most were already swamped and the drivers gone. At the same time, Blanco begged nearly all week for FEMA buses, which barely started arriving Friday; her efforts to directly arrange transportation were greatly hampered by the large-scale, mostly false reports of violence and shooting. (Later investigation concluded that most of the shots fired were ill-thought out efforts to attract rescue attention.)

Then the political gamesmanship began, with President Bush proposing that Governor Blanco federalize the La. National Guard. Blanco saw this as a negative step (they then could not be used tot maintain order), and it wouldn't increase resources. (A House investigative committee later agreed.) She then hired James Witt (Clinton's well-regarded FEMA boss) to lead her state's efforts. Unfortunately, political gaming continued - eg. Republican-led Mississippi received 3X the relief per capita vs. Louisiana.

Moving on to the "after" phase, "Breach of Faith" tells of the Army Corp. of Engineers attempts to cover-up poor levee and pilings design and construction, police looting, insurance problems, the collapse of New Orleans's economy, delays in federal relief funds, sole-source contracts at greatly inflated prices (eg. $175/square paid for roofing, vs. actual costs of $2), rebuilding fights (let N.O. go back to nature), and paying more money to move in rickety trailers than the cost of building hurricane-proof houses.

Horne's Conclusion: If this is the best that Homeland Security and FEMA can do, forget about help in a nuclear attack.

Excellent (and disturbing) reading!

There are several books out about Hurricane Katrina and the response, but none of them have the tremendously powerful "you are there" feeling of this book. Jed Horne writes the facts from the ground, detailing people who were there and how they survived.

Horne details expertly how people reacted as their neighborhoods started flooding, how they managed (or did not manage) to get to the Superdome, what went wrong there, how the response was mismanaged, and gives excellent insights into what went wrong and what should happen next. The chapter detailing how the interns at Charity Hospital survived and cared for their patients during the power outages and flooding is particularly powerful.

As I said in my title, the book reads like a thriller. There are some portions where he describes the power of the floods, people dying, and the terrible response and you think that this would make a terrific fictional movie. It's hard to believe it happened, and Horne's book is a stirring account of the hurricane and its aftermath. I highly recommend this book.