It was hard in this swirl of media to make sense of which stories were truly representative. Would you include President Bush's month-long vacation, still not cut short? Mayor Ray Nagin's eruption on-air?
A year later, it seems pretty clear that there's one whopper that nearly tells them all. Unsurprisingly, it comes from the metro editor of The New Orleans Times-Picayune, which won two Pulitzer Prizes for its Katrina coverage.
"A deadly extreme of bureaucratic inanity was reached out at the airport," writes Jed Horne in his gripping Breach of Faith, "when Dr. Mark Perlmutter, an orthopedic surgeon from Pennsylvania who had come down as a volunteer, was ordered to stop giving chest compressions to a dying woman because he wasn't registered with FeMA."
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Bush was bafflingly slow to leave his ranch to look at the devastation. Afterward, the White House cravenly spent most of its efforts trying to blame Nagin and Louisiana Gov. Kathleen Blanco.
What makes Horne's book compelling, though, is not just his ability to point fingers but also to tell stories. Horne traveled from ward to ward, meeting people trying to wait it out, and those who lent a helping hand. He understood that Katrina included thousands of human stories, and he tells many of them here.
Long-time New Orleans resident Douglas Brinkley offers even more stories in The Great Deluge. He interviews a woman who was raped, but held herself together to commandeer a school bus to get people out to safety; a man who used a Sea Ray to go from house to house on a rescue mission, ultimately rounding up some 250 people from the Seventh Ward.
These stories are so inspiring it's sometimes easy to forget what the city was like before. Tom Piazza's Why New Orleans Matters presents one version of this past, arguing that New Orleans wasn't just a part of American history, but the creative soul of the nation, a place where food and music came together to birth a society that knew how to "short-circuit time in its dumb, earthbound mortal sequence, and restate the things that will last and constantly renew the world."
Michael eric Dyson shares a grimmer pre-disaster perspective. In Come Hell or High Water, he reminds readers that before the hurricane, Louisiana was the second-poorest state in the union. "The poverty, economic inequality and racial injustice that were revealed in Katrina cry out for critical attention," he writes. Katrina's devastation revealed how much the administration's obsession with terrorism had drawn its focus away from domestic problems.
Kevin Powell would second that. Like Dyson, he finds it nearly impossible to separate this tragedy from race and class issues, which he explores in his essay collection Someday We'll All Be Free.
"How many understand what it is like to live in a city like New Orleans, with a black mayor, a majority black police department, a majority black city council, historically black colleges and universities, black businesses and signs and symbols of black success and achievement everywhere, and yet have a life that remains a dream deferred?" Or worse, to then be asked to bear that burden on top of the ravages of Katrina.