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Great Deluge, The | 
| Manufacturer: HarperCollins e-books
Category: EBooks
List Price: $19.95
Buy New: $7.99
You Save: $11.96 (60%)
Avg. Customer Rating:  117 reviews
Sales Rank: 6700
Format: Kindle Book
Media: Kindle Edition
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 768
Dewey Decimal Number: 976.335064
ASIN: B000GCFX5Y
Publication Date: May 9, 2006
Availability: Usually ships in 24 hours
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Amazon.com
Bestselling historian Douglas Brinkley, a professor at Tulane University, lived through the destruction of Hurricane Katrina with his fellow New Orleans residents, and now in The Great Deluge he has written one of the first complete accounts of that harrowing week, which sorts out the bewildering events of the storm and its aftermath, telling the stories of unsung heroes and incompetent officials alike. Get a sample of his story--and clarify your own memories--by looking through the detailed timeline he has put together of the preparation, the hurricane, and the response to one of the worst disasters in American history.
Product Description
In the span of five violent hours on August 29, 2005, Hurricane Katrina destroyed major Gulf Coast cities and flattened 150 miles of coastline. Yet those wind-torn hours represented only the first stage of the relentless triple tragedy that Katrina brought to the entire Gulf Coast, from Louisiana to Mississippi to Alabama. First came the hurricane, one of the three strongest ever to make landfall in the United States -- 150-mile- per-hour winds, with gusts measuring more than 180 miles per hour ripping buildings to pieces. Second, the storm-surge flooding, which submerged a half million homes, creating the largest domestic refugee crisis since the Civil War. Eighty percent of New Orleans was under water, as debris and sewage coursed through the streets, and whole towns in south-eastern Louisiana ceased to exist. And third, the human tragedy of government mis-management, which proved as cruel as the natural disaster itself. Ray Nagin, the mayor of New Orleans, implemented an evacuation plan that favored the rich and healthy. Kathleen Blanco, governor of Louisiana, dithered in the most important aspect of her job: providing leadership in a time of fear and confusion. Michael C. Brown, the FEMA director, seemed more concerned with his sartorial splendor than the specter of death and horror that was taking New Orleans into its grip. In The Great Deluge, bestselling author Douglas Brinkley, a New Orleans resident and professor of history at Tulane University, rips the story of Katrina apart and relates what the Category 3 hurricane was like from every point of view. The book finds the true heroes -- such as Coast Guard officer Jimmy Duckworth and hurricane jock Tony Zumbado. Throughout the book, Brinkley lets the Katrina survivors tell their own stories, masterly allowing them to record the nightmare that was Katrina. The Great Deluge investigates the failure of government at every level and breaks important new stories. Packed with interviews and original research, it traces the character flaws, inexperience, and ulterior motives that allowed the Katrina disaster to devastate the Gulf Coast.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 112 more reviews...
Brinkley gets much of the story correct August 21, 2008
I just reread this book after two years. My first time around I was skeptical how insightful a book could be so soon after Katrina. On my second go round with The Great Deluge, I was impressed by how much of the story Brinkley got right.
* The New Orleans Police Department was as dirty, corrupt and unprofessional as ever. The breakdown of the force was incomprehensible.
* Mayor Ray Nagin was a weak and shallow man with little leadership skills besides self-promotion.
* Governor Blanco was an earnest but overwhelmed figure who didn't understand her own state government well enough in order to harness resources before and after the hurricane.
* FEMA Director Brown was a lightweight political appointee who should have never been in such a key position. However, to his credit he did seem to realize early on that he would need help from above to manage the recovery process.
* Homeland Security Chief Chertoff showed a total inability to process important information, thus completely misreading the situation and failing to alert his boss to the massive mobilization the situation demanded.
* President Bush, who put people like Chertoff and Brown in jobs for which they they were ill-equipped.
If you're looking for more detailed information on specific aspects of Katrina, other books may provide better reading. However, if you want to read one book that gives you an overall perspective on what happened and why, then Brinkley's book is the one to read.
 How hard it is to face the truth how hard it is to stay in a room August 16, 2008
Brinkley's facts are confirmed by contemporaneous news reports and videos available on YouTube. Furthermore, New Orleans was written off because the white people with cars got out, and black and white people so feckless as to not have cars don't count in America. They are left to die alone, and then explode all over their pathetic homes in the heat, as was my neighbor during the Chicago heat emergency of 1995 because so many people in America don't count.
Go ahead and hate your neighbor, go ahead and cheat your friend. Go ahead, and post silly lists of grammar mistakes and run your stupid yap about "liberal agendas". Go ahead and generalize from your service in some military unit reluctantly and slowly detailed to help out, give us your worm's eye view, soldier, boast a little, you may even have the right.
But please don't say it didn't happen. And then don't say they deserved it.
Brinkley's book documents discoveries reminiscent of what Allied soldiers discovered in WWII: death camps.
"Brownie" (Michael Brown, the joke who was appointed head of FEMA) at least tried to do his job, this book documents. The real villains are as usual "flag rank", whose personal coldness is evident, to a frightening degree in reports of their conduct when not on camera and in their eyes when on. What they do to their wives speaks volumes. Can't trust 'em.
Many people reading these reviews work BELOW a bright line in American society which in the last twenty years is crossed, is risen above, only when you demonstrate the ability to (1) find the people who count, who have money and power and (2) write off the rest. It happens in little software development groups and it happens in the large.
Ask yourself, why wasn't Chertoff let go after Katrina? Why wasn't he fired? Why wasn't he outsourced? There's probably more compassion in India.
THE ONES IN POWER WHO KILL PEOPLE DO NOT ADMIT GRIEF. THEY WILL NOT STAY IN A ROOM WITH A DYING BABY. THEY WILL NOT SPEND THE DAYS IT CAN TAKE.
- Jenny Holzer, MOTHER AND CHILD
The conceptual artist Jenny Holzer inscribed those words in 1990.
 Deluge of Mistakes June 1, 2008
3 out of 3 found this review helpful
There are numerous factual errors, for example: Marconi canal... Chalmette bisected by the MRGO... London Ave canal flooded the 9th ward... 9th ward 20 blocks east of the 17th street canal... Mobile & D.C. in the same time zone... 17ft floodwall in Galveston built before the 1900 hurricane. Those are minor errors compared to misreporting, for instance, about events at Tulane and Charity hospitals.
It reads like an editorial and there is no attempt to disguise Brinkley's opinions. Perhaps it is interesting to those who do not know NOLA. To this lifelong resident, it is offensive that someone who has held himself out as having intimate knowledge of NOLA blunders so pitifully.
The accounts of individuals who participated in rescues were interesting.
In his rush to publish what in many ways is nothing more than a compilation of news reports, Brinkley's sloppiness led me to question the legitimacy of much that he wrote.
Breach of Faith is a more thoughtful account of the Katrina disaster. It was written by a reporter for the Times Picayune (the local newspaper for which I have no respect and therefore no interest in promoting one of its own).
 did an editor read this manuscript? March 21, 2008
0 out of 8 found this review helpful
To Harper Collins Publisher (sent 10/27/07):
I would like to register my displeasure at having paid full price for one of your books and found it to be submental in its editing and writing. The book is the new paperback edition of Douglas Brinkley's "The Great Deluge." I have put it down at page 333 because I've been exhausted by its mistakes, redundancy and poor writing.
I bought the book because the review in the New York Time Book Review made the book sound interesting. Upon rereading the review (7/9/06) I see that reviewer David Oshinsky does not comment on the quality of the writing in the book except to say that Brinkley is "a prolific author, known for publishing at breakneck speed." It is also evident that he lacked an editor to slow him down.
Mistakes litter this book like hurricane debris. Page 167: "mideighties." Page 175: "Legolands." On page 198 there is a missing word in the last line of the first full paragraph. On page 55, within six lines in plain view of each other, Brinkley refers to New Orleans Fire Deputy Cynthia "Sylvain-Lear" as both "Sylvain-Lear" and "Sullivan-Lear." Which is it?
Redundancy abounds. Pages 73 and 74 feature four whole paragraphs that twice repeat verbatim information about the "seventeen-foot high flood wall" and the "veritable hurricane machine." On page 275 there is reference to a "bogus rumor."
And maybe I'm being too judgmental, but I would expect from Brinkley a better sentence than, "A good way to describe Hancock Medical Center was as a MASH unit stuck in a flood zone." For that one crappy sentence you should happily agree to refund my purchase price when I ask for it in a moment.
Did David Oshinsky also see the gaffes I see, here already in the paperback edition over a year after that review, and did he just ignore them? (In all, at least THREE New York Times reviewers had something to say about this book, and none noticed the mistakes.) How did these mistakes make it into the paperback edition? Did anyone actually read this book before publishing it?
Can I please have my money back? (I have my receipt: $17.95 at Borders Books.)
I look forward to hearing from you. Thank you!
(NO REPLY. Don't bother with this book.)
Review of "The Great Deluge" March 13, 2008
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
Every literate citizen of Louisiana should take the time to read Douglas Brinkley's book, "The Great Deluge" before any forthcoming election, (local or national), and ask the difficult questions of the prospective candidates how they would react in similar circumstances and what action they would take to preclude a similar event in the future. There is plenty of blame to go around for that disaster and Brinkley is not shy about directing it where it should be cast. An excellent and very written book. It's worth the time to read from cover to cover.The Great Deluge: Hurricane Katrina, New Orleans, and the Mississippi Gulf Coast
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