Breach of Faith: Hurricane Katrina and the Near Death of a Great American City | 
 enlarge | Author: Jed Horne
Publisher: Random House Trade Paperbacks
Category: Book
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Rating:  28 reviews
Sales Rank: 36075
Media: Paperback
Edition: Reprint
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 464
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.7
Dimensions (in): 8 x 5.2 x 1.1
ISBN: 0812976509
Dewey Decimal Number: 976.335064
EAN: 9780812976502
ASIN: 0812976509
Publication Date: July 15, 2008
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Product Description
Hurricane Katrina shredded one of the great cities of the South, and as levees failed and the federal relief effort proved lethally incompetent, a natural disaster became a man-made catastrophe. As an editor of New Orleans’ daily newspaper, the Pulitzer Prize—winning Times-Picayune, Jed Horne has had a front-row seat to the unfolding drama of the city’s collapse into chaos and its continuing struggle to survive.
As the Big One bore down, New Orleanians rich and poor, black and white, lurched from giddy revelry to mandatory evacuation. The thousands who couldn’t or wouldn’t leave initially congratulated themselves on once again riding out the storm. But then the unimaginable happened: Within a day 80 percent of the city was under water. The rising tides chased horrified men and women into snake-filled attics and onto the roofs of their houses. Heroes in swamp boats and helicopters braved wind and storm surge to bring survivors to dry ground. Mansions and shacks alike were swept away, and then a tidal wave of lawlessness inundated the Big Easy. Screams and gunshots echoed through the blacked-out Superdome. Police threw away their badges and joined in the looting. Corpses drifted in the streets for days, and buildings marinated for weeks in a witches’ brew of toxic chemicals that, when the floodwaters finally were pumped out, had turned vast reaches of the city into a ghost town.
Horne takes readers into the private worlds and inner thoughts of storm victims from all walks of life to weave a tapestry as intricate and vivid as the city itself. Politicians, thieves, nurses, urban visionaries, grieving mothers, entrepreneurs with an eye for quick profit at public expense–all of these lives collide in a chronicle that is harrowing, angry, and often slyly ironic.
Even before stranded survivors had been plucked from their roofs, government officials embarked on a vicious blame game that further snarled the relief operation and bedeviled scientists striving to understand the massive levee failures and build New Orleans a foolproof flood defense. As Horne makes clear, this shameless politicization set the tone for the ongoing reconstruction effort, which has been haunted by racial and class tensions from the start.
Katrina was a catastrophe deeply rooted in the politics and culture of the city that care forgot and of a nation that forgot to care. In Breach of Faith, Jed Horne has created a spellbinding epic of one of the worst disasters of our time.
From the Hardcover edition.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 23 more reviews...
 New Orleans-comprehensive coverage October 27, 2008
This book is a smashing account of the disaster in New Orleans. In spite of being "just another" account, it's a real life, gripping drama that you cannot put down. So readable, the drama unfolds with people and circumstances that are unbelievable to the rest of us who could only find facts from news account. Read it; you'll never be the same.
 hard read September 12, 2008
this book is all over the place. I was on page 58 and realized I haven't really learned anything or following any concrete story.
The Great Deluge is much better
 A Lesson About America May 15, 2008
For many of us, watching the events following the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina unfold on our TV screens in August of 2005 was an eye-opening experience. The lasting images of Katrina victims on our TVs telling us of their misery and suffering, while the government seemingly did nothing to intervene, sparked national outrage. In all, Katrina left 1,100 people dead, damaged thousands of residences, crashed the city's water and sewerage infrastructure, took out electricity and mail service for months, and left four-fifths of the city of New Orleans - seven times the size of Manhattan - underwater. A tragedy on this scale hadn't struck the United Stance since the San Francisco earthquake, and the victims we watched on the news - stranded at the Superdome or Convention Center or the highway out of town - represented a small fraction of the estimated 250,000 New Orleans residents left homeless by Katrina. In "Breach of Faith," author Jed Horne, a reporter for the local New Orleans paper who was awarded a Pulitzer Prize for his contribution to the paper's coverage of Katrina, helps explain why this tragedy occurred and what it says about us as a country. Through a series of stories - stories, he says, of heroes, rogues, dreamers, and doers - Horne promises to "provide a lesson for America about itself."
In fact, these stories are the heart of "Breach of Faith." There is the story of the social service worker watching as chaos descends at the Superdome. There is the story of the New Orleans resident who returns to his family's home after Katrina to find an X, code for dead, marking the family house, and the story of his struggle for months fighting FEMA bureaucracy to recover the remains of his father for a proper burial. There is the particularly affecting story of the doctor at the city hospital, serving the poorest of New Orleans residents, as the hospital waits for a week to be evacuated, all the while hearing the sound of helicopters rescuing patients from New Orleans' other, richer hospitals. There is the story of the former levee board president, boating across the drowned city and finding his biggest surprise to be the city's utter silence - no police, no firemen, no one. And then there is the story of the local paper's photographer, who also notes the utter lack of help, the utter lack of government presence whatsoever. A fellow photographer takes the famous picture of the woman who will become a Katrina icon as she slumps to her knees, wrings her hands, and begs, "Help Us."
"Breach of Faith" isn't just the story of Katrina victims, but also of this silence, this utter lack of help for the city of New Orleans. It is the story of the FEMA director who is more concerned with finding a dogsitter and making dinner plans than the suffering on the ground in New Orleans. It is the story of the Homeland Security chief who tells the American people that Katrina was unprecedented and couldn't have been anticipated when, in fact, the whole scenario had not only been anticipated but simulated in a disaster drill just a year earlier. It is the story of insurance companies not honoring Katrina victims' policies but instead leaving coverage up to the federal government, prompting a lawsuit joined by staunch conservative Senator Trent Lott. It is the story of the Army Corps of Engineers who did such a poor job of constructing levees to protect the city from floodwaters that one scientist compared it to "putting bricks on Jello-O." And it is the story of President Bush, strumming on his guitar in San Diego as all this misery is taking place. Three days after Katrina hits, during his plane trip back to Washington, DC, Air Force One flies over New Orleans, leaving a lasting image of Bush in the clouds, peering out the windows to steal a glance at one of the worst disasters in American history from far above.
Through these stories, Horne puts the reader in New Orleans and provides us with a deeper understanding of this man-made disaster, dispelling media myths and explaining the complex series of events that contributed to cause this disaster. Although structuring his book through these stories is somewhat flawed - it is difficult to keep track of the characters and the second half of the book loses steam in focusing on the technical rather than the personal stories of Katrina - Horne succeeds in showing that Katrina is not just a New Orleans story, but rather it is an American story. These are stories of people anyone can relate to - people like us, in situations that could happen to any of us. But ultimately the lesson about America Horne promised readers is unclear. "Breach of Faith" begins and ends with the story of Patrina Peters. At the beginning of the book, the 43-year-old mother living in the Lower Ninth clings to a mattress with her daughter, certain that they will both be killed by the floodwaters. Fortunately, they are saved, then dropped off at the Superdome and eventually displaced to a bland upriver town. At the end of the book, Peters decides she misses New Orleans and her church too much and must return - her faith has not been breached. Like Patrina Peters' story, though, the story behind "Breach of Faith" is unfinished, for we as readers are left to wonder, is Peters' faith justified? Will she make it in New Orleans? According to an article in The New York Times, it is up to us as Americans to determine the fate of New Orleans: will we contribute the funding and vision necessary to rebuild this great city, or will we let it die? This part of the story -- the true lesson about America -- has yet to be written.
 Katrina in Depth April 18, 2008
2 out of 2 found this review helpful
I had heard many good things about this book and wanting to learn more about what happened behind the headlines decided to check it out of the library.
Each chapter covers a topic: Media, Healthcare, Education, Politics, etc. So in the beginning I found it very interesting to read about what happened in New Orleans leading up to Katrina and right after Katrina. While covering the overall topic in each chapter, Horne also provides one personal account to make it real for the reader.
Then he got into the engineering and levee logistics and I found the book hard to follow. Not that it wasn't interesting to learn about what caused the flood and what they were doing (or not doing) to make it better for future years, but for a visual person it was very hard to follow.
Overall, I flew through the first couple of chapters riveted and then slowed down tremendously to get to the end. However, if you are really interested in learning more about Hurrican Katrina I would still recommend this book.
Brilliant, Thorough, Unbiased, and Engaging October 29, 2007
An engaging account of the disaster that came close to sinking New Orleans, both literally and figuratively. Interestingly and intelligently written, Mr Horne manages to turn a multitude of well researched facts and real-life experiences into a page turner.
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