Come Hell or High Water: Hurricane Katrina and the Color of Disaster [BARGAIN PRICE] (Hardcover)

by Michael Eric Dyson (Author) "THE BARRAGE OF IMAGES in newspapers and on television tested the nation's collective sense of reality..." (more)
Key Phrases: disaster capitalism, breached levees, black survivors, New Orleans, Gulf Coast, National Guard (more...)

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly
Starred Review. The first major book to be released about Hurricane Katrina, Dyson's volume not only chronicles what happened when, it also argues that the nation's failure to offer timely aid to Katrina's victims indicates deeper problems in race and class relations. Dyson's time lines will surely be disputed, his indictments of specific New Orleans failures defended or whitewashed. But these points are secondary. More important are the larger questions Dyson (Between God and Gangsta Rap, etc.) poses, such as "What do politicians sold on the idea of limited governance offer to folk who need, and deserve, the government to come to their aid?" "Does George Bush care about black people?" and "Do well-off black people care about poor black people?" With its abundance of buzz-worthy coinages, like "Aframnesia" and "Afristocracy," Dyson's populist style sometimes gets too cute. But his contention that Katrina exposed a dominant culture pervaded not only by "active malice" toward poor blacks but also by a long history of "passive indifference" to their problems is both powerful and unsettling. Through this history of neglect, Dyson suggests, America has broken its social contract with poor blacks who, since Emancipation, have assumed that government will protect all its citizens. Yet when disaster struck the poor, the cavalry arrived four days late. (Jan. 16)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

From The Washington Post
The horrors endured by mostly poor, mostly black New Orleanians -- trapped in deadly floodwaters or left to rot for days on end in the Superdome -- are now well established. And so Michael Eric Dyson might seem to be arguing a closed case: that the drowning of a Southern city and the Bush administration's lethally botched response to Hurricane Katrina reeked of race and class bias. In this scorching iteration of that argument, Dyson visits all the stations of the cross: the disproportionate number of poor blacks who were placed in extremis or killed outright by Katrina and the levee failures that followed; the rapper Kanye West's cri de coeur -- "George Bush doesn't care about black people" -- during an NBC telethon; former first lady Barbara Bush's infuriating comment about things "working very well" for evacuees in the Houston Astrodome since they were "underprivileged" anyway; the racial inequities built into the economy of both New Orleans and the nation overall; the exuberant haste with which media outlets embraced stereotypes that cast African Americans as rampaging looters and rapists. The aggregate effect may not be powerful enough to win converts from among those who think the catastrophe didn't expose ugly fault lines, but it should at least spur an exchange of prisoners from the camps now deeply entrenched on both sides of the question about what Katrina told us about race and racism in America. There's less original reporting here than analysis; Come Hell or High Water draws heavily on press accounts of the Katrina debacle. But the annotation is thorough, and Dyson -- the University of Pennsylvania professor who wrote Is Bill Cosby Right? -- weaves it all together with prose that is resonant and rightly angry. The book's account of FEMA's stunning ineptitude is especially well detailed. And a more original chapter that parses popular culture for insights into America's current racial and cultural climate is an agreeable digression, f lawed only by Dyson's inclination to treat rap jingles -- some transcribed at length -- as oracular. Dyson's lapses are mostly minor ones. His long diatribe against the syndicated columnist Cynthia Tucker seems like filler, a settling of accounts run up over his Cosby book, in which Dyson chided the comedian for seeming to blame blacks for not standing up to social problems associated with poverty and disempowerment. Dyson repeats the now discredited notion that a loose barge caused the Industrial Canal's flood walls to fail. And had New Orleans Mayor C. Ray Nagin not recently declared that Katrina was partially the product of God's wrath against President Bush for occupying Iraq "under false pretenses," Dyson might be accused of going on a bit about religion. But his conclusion is a sound one: that it would be great to see the "prophetic anger" of the black church recommitted to the struggle against poverty. A more serious gripe is that, to make his portrayal of racist oppression all the more compelling, Dyson himself warms to some false and unintentionally demeaning stereotypes about the hurricane's victims. For one thing, the equation between poverty and immobility in the face of the approaching storm isn't nearly as neat as he implies. A lot of the people who stayed behind to ride out Katrina -- rich and poor, black and white -- turned down rides out of town or had cars of their own, making the city's low rate of vehicles per capita a less reliable tool for analyzing the debacle than Dyson suggests. Dyson elsewhere speaks glibly of "the sheer social misery of much of postindustrial urban Southern life." That won't play well in many New Orleans neighborhoods, least of all the storied Lower Ninth Ward, a proud, mostly low-income enclave that witnessed some of the worst flooding. It may be true in a physical sense that the Lower Ninth "crouches behind a pile of dirt" (to quote a Washington Post article that Dyson stitches into his text), but that dirt is the levee that the residents of the Lower Ninth wish had been piled higher. Rich whites in Lakeview, another flooded area, lived behind similar earthworks. And the ugly overtones of this image are off the mark. The Lower Ninth was not a crouching dog in a junkyard part of town, though some parts of New Orleans might have fit that description. Dyson is on firmer ground when he remembers the Lower Ninth's rich cultural and racial pedigree, its "'second-line' parades, characterized by churning rhythms and kinetic, high-stepping funk grooves." The reality of the pre-Katrina Lower Ninth lies somewhere between a dirt-pile dirge and high-stepping funk. The community is, or was, a complex weave of homeowners and destitution, of social pathologies -- also to be found in rich parts of town -- and proud churches, Mardi Gras Indian tribes and other less formal but deeply embracing kinds of camaraderie. Neighborhoods such as that answer a question that must baffle people who have watched New Orleans's ordeal from a distance: Why would anyone be fighting, as many are, to return and rebuild such a place? In fact, the traditions and culture of the Lower Ninth Ward are a reason why the agents of Disneyfication will have a harder time gentrifying New Orleans than post-Katrina developers might hope. Those traditions and culture are also a reason why New Orleans is worth saving. -- Jed Horne is a metro editor of the New Orleans Times-Picayune. His book about Hurricane Katrina will be published in August.

Reviewed by Jed Horne
Copyright 2006, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 258 pages
• Publisher: Basic Books (February 28, 2006)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0465017614
• ASIN: B000MKYKCM
• Product Dimensions: 8.3 x 5.7 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 14.4 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 3.8 out of 5 stars See all reviews (25 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #684,108 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

22 of 24 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Scathing critique of Bush administration, February 3, 2006

By	Professor (New Orleans, LA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Come Hell or High Water: Hurricane Katrina and the Color of Disaster (Hardcover)

I live in New Orleans and I love most aspects of the city. I evacuated before the storm and we lost our home and most of our possessions to flooding. But, this has merely been an inconvenience for me in many ways. As one who had to buy flood insurance to get a mortgage, we were lucky - with the insurance settlement and the sale of gutted house, we will soon be back on our feet financially.

However, spiritually and emotionally, Katrina has changed my life. Much of that is because of the things Dyson writes about in this book. I watched with horror, outrage and sadness as our government (at all levels) failed the people of New Orleans. New Orleanians knew but generally did not speak about the huge racial and class divisions within the city. As I took myself (and my dog) out of the city, I knew thousands would be left behind, and generally felt there was nothing I could do. I had get myself to safety. Of course, Dyson doesn't let people like me off the hook, which is a good thing.

It is painful to read Dyson's book because in so many ways it speaks the truth about our country's attitudes toward the poor and toward African Americans, as well as our government's continued response to their issues. These issues didn't begin with a hurricane; it took that to remind the entire country that we are not a classless society. The book was insightful in many ways, and it provided new information about what really happened. Dyson's writing is searing and unforgiving.

However, I only rate this book 4 stars instead of 5 because it is almost too hard on Bush. I am not a big fan of Bush, and believe wholeheartedly that the federal government bears a great deal of responsibility over its lousy and cruel response to this disaster. I also agree that this is indicative of a larger philosophy about poverty and racism. Worse in some ways is the federal government's continued response by refusing to pay for Category 5 levees and to realistically help people get back on their feet.

Yet, the local and state officials bear a lot more responsibility than Dyson is willing to admit. Although exaggerated, Nagin's "chocolate city" comments illustrate that our local leadership is certainly not beyond reproach. I also found Dyson's defense of Kayne West to be incredibly convaluted - I doubt seriously that West gave as much thought to his words as Dyson seems to think he did. And, although he is correct that the stories of violent crime and looting were exaggerated by the media, they did occur. We saw it on television, and I have a good friend who was trapped for days in a local hospital, afraid for her life b/c of thugs trying to steal the hospital's limited food, water and drug supply. He should not let these people off the hook simply by saying their poverty caused them to enjoy things that had heretofore been denied to them. In that case, laws are meaningless, as is morality.

17 of 19 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A ringing endorsement from New Orleans..., January 24, 2006

By	Orange Fly (New York, New York) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Come Hell or High Water: Hurricane Katrina and the Color of Disaster (Hardcover)

"If we are to have a national debate about race and class as a result of the revelations brought by the storm, this book is a fine place to start. It is also a useful platform for a discussion of what citizens have a right to expect from local and federal government...In COME HELL OR HIGH WATER, his forceful analysis of the issues of race and class revealed in Hurricane Katrina's aftermath, `hip-hop intellectual' Michael Eric Dyson recreates in words those powerful visual images of people abandoned in attics, on rooftops, wading through floodwater, suffering in the Superdome...That it was, and that the situation was such an outrage is behind the righteous anger that fuels Dyson's fast-paced narrative...As we begin the painful process of rebuilding, COME HELL OR HIGH WATER provides a stirring exhortation not to fall into the traps of the past."
-Susan Larson, The Times-Picayune

13 of 14 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A telling picture of the Gulf Coast, March 2, 2006

By	Kenny Masenda (Arlington, TX) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Come Hell or High Water: Hurricane Katrina and the Color of Disaster (Hardcover)

This book has the ability to make us think deeply about the situation not only in the Gulf Coast, but with the people of that territory, their condition, and the way we treat them. He had a lengthy critique of the federal government and their response to Katrina (or lack thereof). The book also forces us to look at ourselves and ask what we could have and what we can do to do a better job of being "our brother's keeper" so to speak. I say this because the general public has done a tremendous job of raising money, providing resources, and our time to the victims, but we must continue to do so. We cannot do it temporarily; the people need our help and it is our duty and responsibility to be there for those in need. Don't get me wrong; it certainly does not excuse the government of their poor and horrendous response to the hurricane, but we must bear some responsibility for our treatment of them. This book clearly states that and much more.