75 books like Weathering Katrina

We have all seen disaster movies and TV shows with people screaming and running around as the earthquake, tsunami, or Godzilla strikes. But Rebecca Solnit argues instead that normal people don’t panic during disasters – it is the elite, the wealthy, and the decision-makers who lose their minds. For normal people, altruism and mutual aid help all of us get through shocks, whether fire, car accident or COVID19. Her writing is excellent and she uses examples across time and space, ranging from the San Francisco earthquake at the start of the 20th century to the Mexico City earthquake at its end.

Sheryl Sandberg movingly tells the story of losing her husband suddenly and having to continue with her family on her own. Grief seems a solitary process that we have to work through by ourselves. But she describes how her process of recovery required connections with friends, with family, and with institutions in her neighborhood. All of us have to deal with personal tragedies like the deaths of loved ones, and I appreciated how this book combined her sharing her personal experience with broader expertise from psychology and social science.

In an age of global warming, Klinenberg’s study of how Chicago did (and did not) cope with a horrible heat wave that hit the city in 1995, killing 739 residents, is more relevant than ever.

He shows how death rates varied hugely across neighborhoods, not so much based on socioeconomic status but on the cohesiveness of the community. In places where neighbors looked in on each other the death rate was lower.

Strong neighborhoods do not just enhance our lives, they can save lives.

We can all think of cities that have been hit by some horrible events – envision Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan, hit by atomic weapons. Or the Oklahoma City bombing that leveled a whole block. Yet these cities not only survived, but thrived. In chapters written by different experts from around the world this book shows how resilient cities are to shocks and disasters. I especially liked the way that the authors focus on the way that we memorialize and remember the past, trying to learn lessons from shocks and bringing those emotions and learning into the present.

Humans can be brave, and humans can be stubborn. Abdulrahman Zeitoun is both.

Refusing to leave New Orleans as Hurricane Katrina built strength out at sea in 2005, he stays and finds himself stranded in an eerily flooded city, seemingly alone and without help. He paddles the watery “streets” in an old kayak and finds others who could not or did not leave, offering help, and for his efforts, is arrested as a suspected terrorist and looter.

This book is not a simple tale of an everyday hero. We meet a character that downplays the dangers of a brewing storm but, despite his stubbornness, is also capable of great selflessness and bravery. The negligence of the institutions we expect to protect us is an insidious theme that runs throughout.

The Tin Roof Blowdown shows us New Orleans, and the surrounding areas the days after Katrina raged havoc. Taking into account the lives that have been traumatized as crime and murders increased nine-fold. Detective David Robicheaux of Iberia Parish finds himself in the midst of a murder in an old-time neighborhood, as he tries to figure out if the murder of a local black boy during a robbery was racially motivated or not. The details and stories of this horrific tragedy show the bleakness of the aftermath and that not only did many reach their deaths, but how many who survived died also. No order exists as Robicheaux tries to unravel his latest mystery.

A memoir that haunted both of us about Broom’s love for the New Orleans house she grew up in, her family, and a neighborhood torn apart by the institutional racism embedded in banking practices, zoning laws, highway development, and other corporate and government policies and practices.

Broom’s mother purchased the house in 1961 in a then “promising” neighborhood. Over the years, the neighborhood was cut off from the city by the growth of the interstate highway, which left this largely Black area in decline from years of indifference by New Orleans elected officials. The house was eventually destroyed by Hurricane Katrina.

The book provides a harrowing description of the destructive effects of institutional racism.

Awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, this collection of short stories draws upon Butler’s fluency in the Vietnamese language, his experiences as an Army intelligence specialist living in Saigon during the war, and later his extensive contacts with Vietnamese communities in and near New Orleans, Louisiana. These stories are Vietnamese aftermath tales of émigrés adjusting to post-war life in America and yearning to retain their individual and cultural identities—a quest Butler described “as a pursuit of self” in our 2005 interview. For me, this book illuminates the culture, history, and communities that I, and most American soldiers, never attempted to know when we were in Vietnam and tended to ignore once Vietnamese resettled in the U.S. This book reaffirms for me that despite our many differences, we are all linked by the joys, sorrows, and hopes of our universal human condition. 

The book is a collection of short stories by my favorite mystery novel writer. Burke’s series detective, Dave Robicheaux, who is both a Louisiana cop and a moral philosopher, repeatedly strives to overcome his own flaws and set right the cruel catastrophes wrought by human ignorance, stupidity, and cruelty. Jesus Out to Sea is infused with the same narrative and poetic ferocity, but without Robicheaux this time. The collection is set in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina and probes the human costs of the devastation wrought by nature and exacerbated by administrative corruption and bad faith. 

A surprising and powerful adaptation of one of the stories—“Winter Light”—will be released theatrically in the fall of 2022 with the title God’s Country. It’s the first feature by Julian Higgins, a promising young director (who happens to be my son). The film premiered at the Sundance Film Festival to enthusiastic reviews and… show more.

In a similar vein to False Witness, Litwin not only exposes the shortcomings of the Garrison investigation into the JFK murder but in the process uncovers the fraud and false information that are cited to support some of the currently popular conspiracy theories about the assassination. It is filled with new information from Litwin’s own extensive research.