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

by Jed Horne (Author)
Key Phrases: hurricane center, concrete flood walls, been overtopped, New Orleans, Baton Rouge, Kurtz Burke (more...)

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)
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From The Washington Post
It is hard to imagine that, less than a year after the worst natural disaster in modern U.S. history, there would be much appetite for reliving the horrors of Hurricane Katrina -- manmade or otherwise. And it is equally difficult to imagine encountering anything fresh on a subject that's been so thoroughly dissected. Yet in this solid if somewhat detached recounting, New Orleans journalist Jed Horne has provided new insights into how a ferocious storm, governmental ineptitude and racially tinged inequities conspired to permanently jeopardize one of the nation's cultural gems.

Breach of Faith begins and ends at the Lower Ninth Ward home of Patrina Peters, 43, a resilient African American mother of two who's disabled by epilepsy, a heart condition and Crohn's disease. With Katrina barreling up the Gulf Coast, it is Peters, holed up in the "camelback"-style house that had been in her family for generations, who eerily sets the stage. Exactly 40 years earlier, she recalls, Hurricane Betsy cut a similar course, killing 75 people and decimating much of the historic black neighborhood. "I have a funny feeling about this," Peters tells her daughter.

From Peters's pre-storm premonition, Horne catalogues the catastrophe in almost hour-by-hour fashion. From the early, misplaced sighs of relief that New Orleans had "dodged a bullet" to the mid-storm mayhem to the hideous finger-pointing by impotent officials, Horne paints in vivid detail what amounted not to just one disaster but to disaster piled upon disaster.

An accomplished author and a veteran editor at the Times-Picayune, the city's gallant newspaper, Horne blessedly brings order to the chaos. Breach of Faith meticulously traces not only the storm's path but also the warnings blared by his colleagues at the newspaper and such experts as Ivor van Heerden, the outspoken deputy director of the Hurricane Center at Louisiana State University. With a much needed calm, Horne helps clarify the record on what transpired in the now-notorious twin cesspools of the calamity: the Superdome and the Ernest N. Morial Convention Center. He knocks down many of the most outlandish tales that circulated at the time, including an assertion by New Orleans Police Chief Edward Compass of "little babies getting raped" in the sweltering arenas. At the same time, the author does not back away from the roasting, putrid reality for the evacuees there, who were treated more like hostages than like citizens.

Nor does Horne flinch from other, less famous tragedies that befell his beloved city. His chapter on the five-day nightmare inside the public Charity Hospital, "downtown New Orleans's huge depression-era monument to poor people's medicine," is among the best portrayals ever penned of that grand institution's struggle for survival. Through the eyes of Kiersta Kurtz-Burke, a doctor working in Charity's rehab department for patients recovering from strokes, head traumas and spinal injuries, we see the hospital's valiant efforts to feed and treat 450 patients -- 46 of them in critical condition -- without electricity to power the ventilators, X-ray machines and laboratory equipment that have become staples of modern medicine.

The medical challenges, it turns out, were the least of the woes; rampant rumors of violence and an amply justified sense of abandonment took a far worse toll. "Kurtz-Burke would recall sitting up Thursday night with a quadriplegic," Horne writes, with the doctor and her patient listening to the thwack-thwack of helicopters rescuing patients from the adjacent Tulane Medical Center. "Everybody knew the score," Kurtz-Burke said months later. "We had poor people. We were going to be last [to be evacuated]. Nobody had any illusions about that."

Horne even traveled to Kobe, Japan, producing a keen assessment of the similarities and differences between the January 1995 earthquake there, which killed 6,401 people instantly, and the crushing blow that struck his hometown. Yet the chapter on Kobe, informative as it is, highlights the weaknesses of Breach of Faith. Strangely, the chapter begins with two pages on storm-related suicides before shifting to the Kobe tale, never returning to the bitterly important issue of the ongoing mental-health crisis in the author's own community. The pages devoted to Kobe might have been better spent in Horne's backyard, taking readers deep inside the devastated Plaquemines Parish, overcrowded shelters, the Army field hospital or a trailer park.

What Breach of Faith often lacks is passion. To steal a cliché, Horne's account is more head than guts. By focusing on government agencies such as FEMA and reports produced months later by congressional investigators, he sometimes fails to convey the true emotional blow that Katrina delivered. Politicians, Army Corps engineers, wealthy lawyers, hotel magnates and French Quarter denizens frequent these pages more often than do the city's richer stew of characters -- characters such as Malik Rahim, an erstwhile Black Panther and armed-robbery convict turned civic leader who single-handedly built a health clinic, feeding station and shelter out of the rubble. But we never see the faces of the sick and hungry lined up at Rahim's Common Ground clinic; we never ride along as Rahim's street medics visit illegal immigrants injured on construction sites.

Horne deserves credit for producing an important book in such short order. Yet by the time we come back to Patrina Peters and her now-drowned house in the Lower Ninth, I found myself yearning for the soul of the Katrina story, the smelly, quirky, gut-wrenching, deadly truth of a city disintegrating. Ah, for just one peek at the unidentifiable bodies inside the makeshift morgue, one drink at the Snug Harbor music club the night the great jazz patriarch Ellis Marsalis made his return, one terrifying night camped out with refugees on the I-10 overpass, one day with a grieving mother or one walk in an old-time jazz funeral procession, the wailing horns just breaking our hearts.

Reviewed by Ceci Connolly
Copyright 2006, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved.

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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: 4.3 out of 5 stars See all reviews (28 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #503,558 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

29 of 29 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 (REAL NAME)

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.

30 of 31 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 (TOP 500 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

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.

21 of 24 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 (REAL NAME)

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.