Customer Reviews

Path of Destruction: The Devastation of New Orleans and the Coming Age of Superstorms

5 star:		(6)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

This is an amazing book, a real page turner. I lived in Louisiana for eight years, and the book really captures a lot of the history, the culture and the realities that led up to the tragedy that befell my beloved former home on my birthday last year.

The narrative is riveting without insulting the intelligence of the reader.

The tragedy of Katrina began many years earlier, and this book helps place events in context. Fully a third of the book recounts history prior to the first raindrops hitting Louisiana.

The book steers a nice balance. It is deep enough to illuminate the political, economic and engineering factors that created the mess, but not so dry as to make it stuffy. It really presents a compelling case study in public policy and illustrates how important geography is to understanding our future.

It is clear that the authors' familiarity with the subject going back several years helped with the background portion of the book. These guys really know this stuff.

This should be a model for a popular account of a major event.

I know that some people may be unhappy that the book skirts over material supporting the second half of the title ("Coming Age of Superstorms") and others may object to any discussion of that topic, but I think that the authors do a good job placing their argument within the framework of mainstream thinking about climate change.

My only complaint is that I wish that there were more maps.

I was amazed at how much information was included in this book -- broad historical perspective, day-by-day, hour-by-hour accounts of the days immediately following the storm -- both what was happening in New Orleans and what was happening in Washington, plus scientific background on how hurricanes form. I highly recommend it!

Path of Destruction provides an in-depth background to the geographic, technical and political contributions to the Katrina disaster. It describes the natural challenges of settling on the active Mississippi delta, the innately human bone-headed attempts to protect settlements on an increasingly vulnerable marshland, and the classic political forces (farces?) over the centuries that made problems worse, and it does it all in a very readable way.

I grew up in New Orleans, and visit family there often, so I thought I understood the growing threat from hurricanes, yet McQuaid and Schleifstein filled in the gaps, and corrected common misconceptions; it is impressively well researched. (The horrendous tale of the response to the great Mississippi River Flood of 1927 alone is worth the price of admission.)

This is what I would call a "crossover book": Even if you're sick of hearing about Katrina-this and New Orleans-that, this book is interesting and readable enough to earn space on your "classic studies of human behavior" bookshelf.

At its best, this book gives the broadest, most clear-headed analysis so far of why and how New Orleans was nearly destroyed.

In the first half - which in my opinion makes this book essential reading for ordinary citizens and officials alike - the authors trace the root causes to geological and topographical causes, made worse by human factors, economic, political and bureaucratic. The authors succeed in showing these causes become intertwined, going as far back to the formation of the Mississippi Delta millennia ago and coming to a head in the 20th century with the development of modern New Orleans.

The second half of the book gives a blow-by-blow account of Katrina's landfall and its aftermath, seen through the eyes a handful of disparate residents struggling to survive, and through those who (mis)managed the disaster, as well. The authors bring to life the victims of the storm, emphasizing their suffering and perseverance.

The authors portray whatever successes the disaster relief had in saving lives and easing suffering as being a patchwork of ad-hoc efforts by low- to mid-level officials who threw out the book. Those in officialdom who made interpreting the book their biggest priority - Gov. Kathleen Blanco, the heads of Homeland Security, FEMA and the military - are described in less-than-heroic terms (though "Brownie" appears less the incompetent political hack than he's generally portrayed as being by the media, though I suspect the authors merely took the head of FEMA at his word, in interviews and his self-serving congressional testimony).

Those more concerned about saving their own political skin than in saving people's lives - the Bush administration - are justly cast as outright boobs. Somewhere in the middle is Ray Nagin, New Orleans' hapless mayor, who spends most of the book complaining to talk shows when he isn't sequestered in a hotel room.

As good as this book is in substance, it leaves much to be desired in presentation.

To start, the first two chapters can easily be skimmed or skipped altogether. In these chapters, the authors go too far in invoking "narrative journalism" to recount in detail several major storms of the past few hundred years - one of which, the Galveston, Texas, hurricane of 1900 -- didn't actually hit Louisiana. There's a particularly maddening passage extending several pages that narrates, for no reason I can discern, the early history of hurricane tracking. Interesting for a book devoted to meteorology, but not relevant here.

The book also does not have a detailed bibliography; it has vague summaries of the source material. I'm a geek when it comes to this sort of thing, so this may not be too important to most readers. But it is frustrating that the sources for chapters 7-15 are written off in a single paragraph. That's half the book here, fellas - not among the best practices of nonfiction.

The visual elements are also lacking. The black-and-white maps are crammed onto two pages, are difficult to read and don't show many of the areas described in the text. The photos aren't compelling at all. (Most are credited to government agencies - did the Pulitzer-winning Times-Pic not allow the authors to reprint some of its staff-shot photos??)

Finally, as other reviewers have pointed out, the "age of superstorms" part of the title is mostly an afterthought. The authors half-heartedly outline the debate over global warming-generated vs. cyclical upticks in hurricane intensity, but don't go so far as to say which side has the best evidence to support it.

Three stars.

In 2002, John McQuaid and Mark Schleifstein wrote "Washing Away," an award-winning series for the New Orleans Times-Picayune. The authors exposed the unique vulnerability of New Orleans to hurricanes, exploring "an obvious but little-acknowledged fact: here was a city that, for the six months of every hurricane season, lived with a substantial risk of utter annihilation...much of the city was built on top of a swamp, below sea level and gradually sinking."

On August 29, 2005, Hurricane Katrina struck New Orleans and the Louisiana coast. In Path of Destruction: The Devastation of New Orleans and the Coming Age of Superstorms, McQuaid and Schleifstein revisit familiar territory, helping readers understand why this tragic event happened when there were so many warnings.

Path of Destruction outlines the factors that contributed to the tragedy in New Orleans. By 2005, many levees were still incomplete and those built had inadequate safety levels, with safety factors of 1.3 (bridges have a safety factor of 2). The Army Corps of Engineers were more interested in commerce than hurricane safety. When combined with sinking marshlands and unstable soil, these facts increased the likelihood that levees would be overtopped or broken by a Category 2 hurricane, turning much of New Orleans into a lake. Hurricanes sweeping in off the Gulf of Mexico no longer have extensive marshlands to diminish the storm's strength for "the delta has collapsed like a souffle."

McQuaid and Schleifstein also provide extensive evaluation of Katrina's aftermath. Once the levees broke, 80% of New Orleans was under water and the delayed response by FEMA severely increased the misery caused by Katrina.

Despite the harrowing experiences of one year ago and the knowledge that what happened in New Orleans was "catastrophic structural failure" not an "act of God," the U.S. government is poised to repeat prior mistakes. The Corps is rebuilding levees to their former level of protection, leaving New Orleans as exposed as before Katrina. At one point, Corps contractors were caught "dredging up weak soil and incorporating it into a new levee." Given the prediction of an increase in Katrina-like storms, the time to act and prevent future tragedies is now.

Armchair Interviews says: Alarming information from award-winning journalists.

This is not your typical Hurricane Katrina book, and that's why you need to read it. Of all the books I've read about the storm, this book best explains what happened to lead up to the events of Aug 29, 2005. The other reviewers have really summed the book up well.

I am a Katrina survivor and, of course, am interested in all things written about this storm and its aftermath. This is the best of all that I have read and reads like a great novel with good descriptions of the devastation as well as the principles involved.

The book did a good job portraying the devastation of Katrina on the city of New Orleans, but it appears the authors didn't think we survivors from the MS gulf coast rated enough to even be mentioned. The storm leveled Biloxi, and surrounding coastal MS towns. Katrina did not directly hit N.O. That city felt the resulting floods, but the wind damage, and storm surge was felt the most in Bay St. Louis, MS. I wait for the day when the real story of the entire devastated areas is told.

Path of Destruction tells the story of Hurricane Katrina and its impact on New Orleans quite well. Even better, it gives us the "back story" on the history of hurricanes along the Gulf Coast, and the gradual settling of New Orleans, starting with the Native Americans.

Given that virtually every politician responsible really messed up big time, from the mayor, governor, senator, president, FEMA officials, etc., I thought the tone of the book was surprisingly fair and mostly devoid of blame, but perhaps that's because the authors assigned blame so evenly to almost everybody in a position of authority.

In many ways, the head of FEMA, one Mr. Brown "Doin' a heck of a job, Brownie", is made to look less like the pathetic character he was than just another victim of Bush's malaise and indifference towards the have-nots. Apparently, FEMA was built up to an almost adequate ageny under the previous administration, but Bush went out of his way to eviscerate FEMA, as he philosphically believed that disaster response was best left to the states.

Bush is treated somewhat with kid gloves in this book, possibly because it was written by newspaper reporters who have an almost compulsive need to be fair and balanced even when there really is only one side of the story. However, a few scathing remarks appear occasionally in the book, such as this one that rang true with me: "Katrina exposed the basic incompetence of Bush and his lack of empathy".