'Katrina' brings back flood of memories

It begins being mostly about race and it ends being mostly about race. So it often seems to go with most true American stories.

And it is in large part because race lately imposes itself upon our national consciousness with even greater force than usual that Gary Rivlin’s vital, comprehensive account of Hurricane Katrina’s long-term impact on the city of New Orleans comes across less as a 10-year-anniversary marker of an indelible calamity and more as an up-to-the-minute microcosm of our larger society. And not just with its racial prejudices, but also with its class divisions, collisions of self-interest and, once in a while, hard-won rewards for sheer perseverance.

Katrina opens neither with the eponymous hurricane that ravaged the Gulf Coast in late August 2005 nor with the subsequent flooding that devastated thousands of homes and lives throughout New Orleans. It begins with the harrowing stand-off between predominantly black crowds from the city attempting to walk across the bridge spanning the Mississippi River into suburban Gretna seeking water, food and escape from the flood, and an armed police barricade of police from that predominantly white municipality that refused to let anyone from New Orleans cross the bridge, not even tourists who were simply trying to find some way back to their homes.

Rivlin uses this incident as both prologue to and emblem of the botches, glitches, missed opportunities and static (at best) progress that made up the next decade of what some Crescent City residents dolefully (and with much irony) refer to as “recovery.” The former New York Times reporter stayed with the story, and manages to pack into a lean, taut narrative the heartbreaking setbacks, thwarted dreams and the confounding, repeated inability of anybody in power to either get things done or transcend festering social divisions.

From hundreds of interviews with survivors, evacuees, middle- and working-class black families, entrenched elites, nouveau riche millionaires and leaders occupying varied points of the political spectrum, Rivlin fashions rich character studies. The most complex and exasperating is that of Ray Nagin, the city’s mayor, who for all his blithe charm, seems throughout his tenure to be overwhelmed by events and incapable of carrying out anything resembling a consistent plan. (He is now in prison on corruption charges.)

Then there are people in Katrina you’ve likely never heard of, but seem to at least have their eye on the ball: Alden McDonald, president of one of the nation’s largest African-American-owned banks heroically trying to restore some economic autonomy to the city’s black citizens; Joseph Canizaro, a white real-estate mogul with connections to the Bush White House, who is seeking consensus on where and how to rebuild; and Malik Rahim, a former Black Panther overcoming obstacles to lead rebuilding efforts in the beleaguered (mostly black) Ninth Ward.

Their stories and those of many others in Katrina give greater dimension to what remains to this day the saga of a city staggered by unimaginable catastrophe and struggling with an uncertain future. As with the finest works of journalism, Rivlin’s book deploys the tools of his trade to illuminate the segment of history he examines – and make us wonder about the things we all have in common with those in New Orleans.

Katrina: After The Flood by Gary Rivlin

Simon & Schuster, 419 pp.

4 stars out of four