Customer Reviews

Heart Like Water: Surviving Katrina and Life in Its Disaster Zone

5 star:		(7)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

I read all the glowing reviews and some of my friends are featured copiously throughout this volume--people who are actually unbelievably gracious and compassionate--but I just couldn't get past Joshua Clark's drunken frat boy sensibilities--something about Clark struck me in the back of the head like a silver spoon from a spoiled, New England prep-school, rich kid's soft, workless hands. I lived through it too and it wasn't a party like Mr. Clark paints it...not one bit. I could only read half of it; as lively as his memoir could get there was something incredibly immature and insensitive about Mr. Clark's actions in his account...maybe the latter half of the book redeems itself and if so, I will review in kind. Although it can be engaging in a kind-of voyeuristic sense, I can only give it two stars because the five star praise by the other posters was far too generous.

Joshua Clark's HEART LIKE WATER is powerful, poignant, touching and amazing unlike any other book I've read about surviving a disaster. Street-wise Clark takes readers through the French Quarter's back alleys, to indestructable bars that stayed open during the hurricane, and out-lying areas not mentioned in news accounts. With a beautiful, gritty writing style, he gives us the perspectives of people who could be easily over-looked but whose experiences take us as close to the eye of the hurricane, and its terrible aftermath, that out-siders can get. This book will prove to be the quintessential Katrina chronicle for years to come. Ghost Hunter's Guide to New Orleans

Wow. Despite the tragedy that frames this book, it's one of the most wild, roller-coaster, entertaining reads I've ever had. It's the story of families forged in crisis, how people banded together and survived amongst the hurricane's aftermath in the French Quarter. One of the most memorable characters here is Ride who was the neighborhood's makeshift medic before the Red Cross or any EMS could get in. He sewed a guy's ear back on, healed wounded animals, treated gangrene on a woman who swam out of the floodwaters straight to Johnny White's bar which refused to close for one second. In the second half of the book, as electricity finally returns to their neighborhood, Clark and Ride travel to all the other regions, documenting the human details left after the wind and water, the sediment and sentiment there, in a way far deeper than any news broadcast could ever do. Some of the questions Clark faces: Where does your heart go when you must choose between the first place that ever loved you, and a person you love more than you ever thought was possible? And how do you, against all odds, make it through the hard time with a tear in your eye and a smile on your lips?
This is a must read for every American.

Louisiana is about life: a rich, full, raucous, outrageous will to life, claiming itself no matter what.

Here, about fifty miles north of New Orleans, it was 5:45 in morning when the power went down. It would be 5:45 PM, eighteen very long, very hard, very hot days later when the power came back on.

During that time we had no true pictures of what our beloved city was going through, nor the coast, nor the surrounding parishes--just voices on the radio crying of the horror and soul-tearing destruction which Katrina had wrought.

When the power came back on, we began to get an idea, only an idea because pain like that, loss like that does not truly translate into camera shots, into sound bytes.

Joshua Clark's Heart Like Water:Surviving Katrina and Life in Its Disaster Zone is heart-tearing, mind-bending, for those who love the Gulf Coast, who love the Crescent City, because it is intensely, oh so intensely, personal.

There is something resilient, heroic, about folks who love their city taking brooms to hand to clear the banquettes; there is something life-affirming in reading of those same folks clearing the streets for emergency vehicles to pass through.

Joshua Clark's Heart Like Water takes us back to 1718, when New Orleans first began, yet to become the realization of insight, far sight, and a dream of an incredible port city. She is a dream carved out of the river lands; a vision birthed so long ago, held onto with desperation in the post-hurricane times despite intense heat, suffocating humidity, ravenous mosquitoes, and other things best left in dark corners and crevices unseen, but so visible after these storms.

Joshua Clark's Heart Like Water makes this catastrophe personal be it the missing fingers of Jesus behind the St. Luke Cathedral; sheets, or a mud filled sock, hanging suspended from a tree in Lakeview; the devastation of the 9th Ward; the wave-eaten town of Waveland on the Mississippi Gulf Coast--gone, just gone, pulverized by wind by the first eye wall; tidal surged and dragged out to sea by the heart of Katrina, pulling out every cell of the town.

Josh and a handful of others stayed--to witness, to tell the story of the heart of the Crescent City being bled by Katrina. They stayed, they survived to share the story--to take us to the warehouse that was filled with produce while people hungered in the Superdome; to that same warehouse as it blows sky high with its adjacent building, yet another victim of the post storm chaos.

It is Josh who baptizes himself in the muddied waters of the main water artery of this country, as he eases himself into the mighty Mississippi in a kind of spiritual joining.

Josh and those with him have lived in a place apart--lived in it, lived through it--and found parts of themselves that could survive it all, just as New Orleans and the rest of the Gulf Coast has. He tells us a story of the city; of parishes and counties; of a coast ripped, blown, muddied, burned and gouged apart--that can only be brought together again with the massive effort, coordination, and cooperation that comes from joined hearts and minds.

Joshua Clark's Heart Like Water:Surviving Katrina and Life in Its Disaster Zone is intoxicating -- and that has nothing to do with the liquor consumed in the aftermath of this city, town, and coast-eating event. Heart Like Water intoxicates because of its truth, its visceral reality. I could not but sip slowly from its pages; walking with Josh through the Quarter; aching in Lakeview; crying on the bridge looking down at the 9th Ward; venturing inside homes and lives shredded by this cataclysmic storm.

He gives us water, mud, and things we would rather had always stayed in the dark. He hands us soaked family pictures, unredeemable. He tears out our hearts with pieces of homes, of furniture, of jobs, of lives tangled in the wreckage of the pain of this unnecessary horror.

And yet he shows us, step by step, street by street, town by town, that we go on, despite life-eviscerating winds, home-gagging water, hollow promises made in our Jackson Square.

In shared meals, shared produce, rare frosted drinks, in a cell phone and a laptop charged here or there by the famous `kindness of strangers,' he gives us the great truth, that we go on, we can go on.

Indeed, we must go on.

Joshua Clark's Heart Like Water reminds us that homes, towns, cities are not the buildings, but the people; that they are the dreams, the resilience, the determination of those same people.

It makes us understand why so many post-war European cities were rebuilt stone-for-stone.

We are the world we make; the world we preserve, rebuild, hold dear.

Josh Clark has given us a great, great gift in the pages of Heart Like Water.

Sip it slowly, page by page, day by day--coming up from under the ravages of wind and water to remember who the people of the Gulf Coast are--can do people--born and raised here in this mud --who, while we may have hearts like everyone else's made mostly of water, the rest is the pure gold of love of place.

Come to New Orleans, to the Gulf Coast with Josh through the pages of
Heart Like Water:Surviving Katrina and Life in Its Disaster Zone.

--it will be a journey you will never forget. And then follow the lead he gives you, and help us help the Crescent City, the wetlands, the Gulf Coast--understand what you personally have to lose if we lose our wetlands, the port, and the coast we hold so dear.

A few quick notes. I enjoyed Clark's prowess with imagery and words. Many times scenes appeared in three dimensions: raw, tactile, flowing yet edgy. The characters were very much the same way. The experiences unique, surreal. Some scenes were much like dream...a dream gone horribly wrong, one you begin to long to wake up from.

But as much as I enjoyed the writing, it was also a formidable obstacle to the story. Too many times (at least for me) the imagery dragged on long after the image or scene had served its purpose. The depth of creative exploration became, in a word, indulgent, and there was a sense of reaching too far to go over the top, a worthy endeavor artistically, but it favored going gonzo at the price of historical relevance, story line, and pacing.

The other thing I noticed was despite Clark's fearlessness in his writing style, I felt perhaps he was too close in time and proximity to the event to fully connect on a deeper emotional level. There is an emotional timidity and distance in the telling -- I'm not sure what the right words are -- a stepping back from the situations he was in and wrote about, a sense that if he really connected to his feelings on paper it would be emotionally overwhelming. It's like he was using his creative horsepower to withdraw into his own experience vs truly connecting himself to the story swirling around him.

I don't feel comparisons to other survivors is fair. Every story is different, each with their own compelling material, and this is Joshua's story. Getting hammered amidst disaster is completely foreign to me. What amazed me was the relentless hunt for, and consumption of alcohol, and how much of the story was relegated to that. By the end, so much drinking had been done it practically deserved the title "Heart Like Booze". Still, this indulgent tale and its historical setting are worthy of a place on the bookshelf, and I admire anyone with the courage to take so many writing risks AND pen a memoir.

On the one hand, I quite loved this book. On the other hand, I wanted to reach out and smack the author any number of times while I was reading this book. The scenes the author painted for us - his descriptive telling of the surroundings, the geography of this city I know so well and love so much, the noises (or lack of them), the scents of the city as Katrina rolled in on them and the aftermath in the first days were so real and honest. His story sucked me in for hours at a time. I would sort of emerge from this book almost gasping for air and realize literally two hours had passed me by unnoticed.

And yet.... I just wanted to reach through time and thump him the in the forehead like a wayward child and say "sober up you moron!" Tell him step back from the booze for one afternoon like a rational person. First - had he been sober he might have gotten rid of the whiney, bratty girl friend and put her uselessness on a bus the day BEFORE Katrina struck. Second... Perhaps he might have noticed there was a reason the city was still so silent, still empty 14 days after Katrina herself was gone. Perhaps, had he been just a tad less stoned, just a tad more hydrated on anything other than vodka and prune juice cocktails, it might have ocurred to him to take a bike ride just a half mile further over and cast a glance down at the Lower 9th Ward where the bodies were floating out in the open.

Of course that is easy to say in hindsight, not having lived in the author's footsteps myself. Who am I - who are any of us to criticize how another person lives through a crisis? Our nature is to stick close to home and take care of the things, people and places that we know and are familiar and comfortable with. That is normal and healthy and that is exactly what the author did.

His courage is in telling his own tale, warts and all. I for one think he did that pretty darn well and I am glad to have read this book.

I wanted to write this when I finished reading. It is not a "quick read". Joshua has put his soul into this work. I am from New England and the entire theme is foreign to me. I bought this as someone who knows someone from NOLA. It wouldn't have mattered, the true story carries itself, you need not have any connection to that lovely, historic city to be absorbed and not want to put it down. The book is so special, each chapter, every word for all to read and to recommend.

Like others in the French Quarter, Clark figured he'd be OK, his condo was 4 flights up. And for someone who stayed, he was OK, just like everyone else in the Quarter.
He wasn't in the "disaster" zone,god knows he had plenty of booze to drink, and because of Katrina he would continue to work as a writer during the weeks after the storm. Relatively speaking, I just didn't really care about his dilemma, compared to others in New Orleans. I think he made much of how he helped others and yet somehow I felt he was very self-centered, and he was just helping because he had nothing else to do. Between him riding around on the bike, and his girlfriend with the depression, and his opinions on politics....I just found the book the book to be very disjointed. It needed some editing, at the very least.
There a lot of books about there about Katrina and the aftermath. I've read a lot of them. From now on I'll be more careful to read books about people whose voices need to be heard, instead of by people who can whine the loudest.

This book gives you great insight into life in New Orleans immediately after Katrina. The writer perfectly combines real life experiences with his superb imagination amd story telling skills. I have fallen in love, again with the city of New Orleans and now, with the writing of Joshua Clark!!!

I thought no way could this book live up to its amazing blurbs. I was wrong. This is an adventure story, a survival tale, a love story. This book is a bit like Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas meets The Day After Tomorrow -- except of course it's in the real life inferno of New Orleans rather than an imaginary frozen New York City. This is the story of those who stayed behind in the city they loved. It's what is was like to live -- not as a journalist, but as a citizen -- in a modern American city completely emptied of people and electricity, amidst our nation's greatest tragedy. This is the only time this has ever happened in America. And so far this is the only book from from someone who was there the entire time.

But the book is not only from Clark's perspective -- it is the voices of the hundreds of people he recorded over two months in every neighborhood and every last region the hurricane struck, including Mississippi. It is these elements combined -- an oral history measured with a first person insider perspective -- that render it a unique testament, that make it both more intimate and more comprehensive than the Katrina books we've seen so far, and indeed make it an amazing read even if Katrina had never happened.

This is not a book about politics and fingerpointing. Instead, Heart Like Water is witness to what we as Americans are capable of when our civilization is stripped of modernities and laws, the morals that remain, the tug of war between utopia and Lord of the Flies.

Clark has that rare power to be funny as heck and heart-breaking all in the same paragraph. He puts us there, tells us what it's like walking on the windows of skyscrapers, and pulling stars out of the bottoms of his feet; cleaning up fallen brick walls with bleeding hands to make way for emergency vehicles; getting the first katrina tattoo using a Mag Lite and car battery while the Mayor asks for 25,000 body bags over the radio; having the police draw guns on him in the middle of the night, threaten to shoot him and his girlfriend, handcuff them outside his aparment; cooking gourmet desserts with anything he and his friends can find over a mound of burning sticks; watching and feeling their neighborhood blow up in the middle of the night on his birthday; the way a dog will curl up on the concrete slab foundation of his old home at exactly the spot his favorite couch used to be; a house that appeared across St. Louis Bay in Mississippi after the storm and no one knows where it came from; crawling through the crushed frame of peoples' homes with them looking for a child's pictures. But do not think this is some morbid Katrina sob story. It is one of hope and humor, which is how they survived.