The "Katrina Effect"

This well curated collection is as timely as it is sobering. It provides an urgently needed look into the fragile networks that hold societies together and that quickly unravel when a debilitated area is hit by calamity. By examining the political, technological, psychosocial, and material components of catastrophic natural events-or tragedy of the sort that climate change is bound to intensify-these essays force us to confront what otherwise staggers the mind. They demand that we be willing and able to think openly and honestly about the whole tangle of vulnerabilities that create the conditions for worst-case disaster scenarios. * Lawrence Torcello, Assistant Professor of Philosophy, Rochester Institute of Technology, USA *
The 'Katrina effect' describes the process by which the 2005 hurricane that devastated New Orleans became a central point of reference for larger critiques of existing social, political, and economic relations and structures. Katrina, the editors suggest, became shorthand to describe the failure of institutions, leaders, and policies in a variety of contexts and for the reckoning and debates that followed those failures, both in the US and abroad. This excellent collection of 14 essays probes the 'Katrina effect' from a variety of disciplinary perspectives. Contributions come from an international roster of historians, philosophers, sociologists, architects, urban planners, and journalists. The essays explore the impact of the disaster on New Orleans (the photo essay by local journalist James O'Byrne is especially noteworthy), but they also place the city and hurricane in larger contexts, including discussions of US urban policy, neoliberal economic policies, and the politics of memory. Several authors compare and contrast events in New Orleans with the situation in Port-au-Prince following the 2010 earthquake. The editors provide an excellent introduction. A valuable collection that will be of great interest to scholars in a range fields. Summing Up: Highly recommended. Upper-division undergraduates and above. -- M. Mulcahy, Loyola University Maryland, USA * CHOICE *