Winner of the Bancroft Prize
Louisiana Endowment for the Humanities Book of the Year
A Publishers Weekly Book of the Year
“The main thrust of Horowitz’s account is to make us understand Katrina—the civic calamity, not the storm itself—as a consequence of decades of bad decisions by humans, not an unanticipated caprice of nature.”—Nicholas Lemann, New Yorker
“Masterful…Disasters have the power to reveal who we are, what we value, what we’re willing—and unwilling—to protect.”—New York Review of Books
“If you want to read only one book to better understand why people in positions of power in government and industry do so little to address climate change, even with wildfires burning and ice caps melting and extinctions becoming a daily occurrence, this is the one.”—Los Angeles Review of Books
Hurricane Katrina made landfall in New Orleans on August 29, 2005, but the decisions that caused the disaster can be traced back almost a full century. After the city weathered a major hurricane in 1915, its Sewerage and Water Board believed that developers could safely build housing away from the high ground near the Mississippi, on lowlands that relied on significant government subsidies to stay dry. When the flawed levee system failed, these were the neighborhoods that were devastated.
The flood line tells one important story about Katrina, but it is not the only story that matters. Andy Horowitz investigates the response to the flood, when policymakers made it easier for white New Orleanians to return home than for African Americans. And he explores how the profits and liabilities created by Louisiana’s oil industry have been distributed unevenly, prompting dreams of abundance—and a catastrophic land loss crisis that continues today.
About the Author
Andy Horowitz is Associate Professor of History at Tulane University. His writing has appeared in the Journal of Southern History, Southern Cultures, Historical Reflections, The Atlantic, the Washington Post, and the New York Times.
Industry Reviews
“The main thrust of Horowitz’s account is to make us understand Katrina—the civic calamity, not the storm itself—as a consequence of decades of bad decisions by humans, not an unanticipated caprice of nature… He leaves readers with a strong sense that it’s only a matter of time before there is a similar disaster in New Orleans, and that, in whatever lull there is between now and then, things aren’t great.”
Nicholas Lemann, New Yorker
“Brilliant… If you want to read only one book to better understand why people in positions of power in government and industry do so little to address climate change, even with wildfires burning and ice caps melting and extinctions becoming a daily occurrence, this is the one… Horowitz shows—patiently and damningly—how the decisions made by Louisiana’s political and business elite systematically rendered the region vulnerable to disaster.”
Scott W. Stern, Los Angeles Review of Books
“Easily the best book on the subject since Douglas Brinkley’s 2006 The Great Deluge: Hurricane Katrina, New Orleans, and the Mississippi Gulf Coast… The fact that Katrina’s impact fell disproportionately on poor Louisianans raises a host of issues that Horowitz addresses better than any previous narrative history of the catastrophe.”
Steve Donoghue, Christian Science Monitor
“Horowitz does a masterful job of describing the public and private engineering projects that made possible real estate construction, oil exploration, and other forms of economic expansion in New Orleans during the twentieth century, building fortunes for a few while putting thousands in the path of the next big storm… Disasters have the power to reveal who we are, what we value, what we’re willing—and unwilling—to protect.”
Eric Klinenberg, New York Review of Books
“Horowitz is engrossed by the stark imbalance that pandering to the powerful industries of shipping and oil and gas has produced between ‘private profits and public liabilities.’ His story is a feisty blend of urban environmental history and history of political economy, of land subsidence (drained land sinks) and subsidized loans that create a false sense of impermeability… From start to finish, Horowitz’s necessary book is passionately political.”
Peter Coates, Times Literary Supplement
