Customer Reviews

Katrinaville Chronicles: Images and Observations from a New Orleans Photographer

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Mr. Spielman's approach in presenting the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina is excellent. He guides the reader, using photography, to relate the sequences of events in a very clear, realistic and poignant way, especially, on his photograph depicting the sick and the poor waiting for medical services in a cold morning in Audubon Park in December nearly three months after Hurricane Katrina made landfall. showing a Third World situation inside the world's most advanced and richest country. All because of bureaucratic red tape and FEMA inability to handle a catastrophy of such magnitude.

I evacuated, returned to my own Uptown neighborhood eight weeks after the storm... and after just now looking at David's book I'm seeing it all over again. And, I'm seeing things I've never seen (Six Flags under 20+ feet of water). The emails walk you through what it was really like, the photos are reminders of what happened to this American city. All Americans should see these unique photos, this unique perspective, as we continue to try and fathom what happened here. This is the perfect presentation. I don't live in New Orleans anymore for a million reasons... but these photos take me 'home' again, and this is a book you will show your friends for years to come.

David Spielman's book is both awesome and emotionally jarring. It's as close as one can come to experience Katrina without having been there.

Two years ago today I was in New Orleans, gutting houses for Habitat for Humanity. My son, my brother, his son and I were there for several weeks, and got to see first-hand what the aftermath of Katrina was like. It's similar to childbirth: until you've experienced it first hand, the full impact doesn't really hit you. I had seen the photos and the footage, but as we drove through the 9th Ward on the day we first arrived, I realized NOTHING had prepared me for what I was seeing in front of me, that day, June 18, 2006. It didn't seem as if we were still in America - it was more like being in the aftermath of a war zone in some other country. The wide streets, empty and silent; the school-bus-sized piles of what had been the entire contents of a family's home; the stench that lay over everything (this came from the refrigerators stuffed with food and rotten water: "Katrina Soup", my brother called it). And in the trees that were still upright, if you looked closely, you could see where strands of Mardi Gras beads still hung from people having thrown them up there, in celebration, over a year and a half ago. The book was so brilliant - his photographs bring it all back to me in vivid relief. The one that affected me the most was the one of the shrimp boat sitting at the end of the street. My brother took me to see that same boat the first night we were in New Orleans, and I visited it several times after. And his descriptions - !! The heat, the isolation, the fear, and the adventure of what he was living. God bless his friends and family for saving his e-mails and urging him to publish them. This book is an absolute treasure.