Michiko Kakutani positively reviews two new books about Hurricane Katrina in the NYT. The first is The Great Deluge by Tulane historian Douglas Brinkley. Brinkley is a New Orleans native, and his book provides tremendous detail, as well as a personal look at the Hurricane and its aftermath. Douglas Brinkley was on Fresh Air this week. The second book is The Storm by Ivor van Heerden. van Heerden is the co-founder of the LSU Hurricane Center, and his book provides a less personal, more scientific look at what went horribly wrong.
New Orleans’ newspaper, The Times-Picayune, has created a fascinating animated map of the sequence of events that led to the flooding of the city.
Find out how the candidates for mayor of New Orleans would react if they came across Nicole Ritchie and Paris Hilton stranded on a roof top and could only rescue one in this penetrating interview.
Lastly, Rob Walker, author of the excellent Letters from New Orleans, has used a quote from our review as a blurb for the book on his web site. Really.
May 19th, 2006 at 9:45 am
I just wish Brinkley wasn’t such a self-serving dork–although from the looks of it, this might be the best book he’s written.
May 19th, 2006 at 10:24 am
What’s the beef with Brinkley in the academic historian circles? I don’t know that much about him. A minor complaint: A journo friend pointed out that he misspelled the name of a co-worker in the foot notes.
May 19th, 2006 at 6:53 pm
I’ve admittedly only read one of his books, a quickie bio of Rosa Parks (Thesis: Rosa Parks was a saint and everything she did was saintly, and God, that woman was a saint.), but some of the others are pretty questionable. The Kerry biography was definitely a mistake in judgment — he wrote that for money and attention, not to fill any scholarly need, and the Carter biography may have been as well.
On the subject of footnotes, [.... on the advice of counsel, this comment has been edited to remove what our legal friends call "potentially actionable material" - which is a nice way of saying we'd rather not hear from Mr. Brinkley's attorneys: ed.] . I know that’s inside baseball, but it tells me a lot.
It’s just hard for academic historians not to conclude that this guy is all hat and no cattle.
May 22nd, 2006 at 9:18 pm
You can remove it all you want, but it’s still true.
Also, do you know where Brinkley was during the flood? He was giving interviews to Larry King about Sean Penn’s “heroic” rescue mission.
http://www.eonline.com/News/Items/0,1,17336,00.html?tnews
May 22nd, 2006 at 10:29 pm
I don’t doubt the veracity of the story - I just don’t want to prove it in court is all I’m saying. That’s a great link, by the way.