Review\n“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\n“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\n“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\n“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\n“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\n“Horowitz chronicles an endless hustle in which governments and wealthy developers seize landscapes and mold them without regard to long-term consequences, and in which white people and moneyed interests have fixed advantages…A sadly predictable, distinctly American story.”―John McQuaid, Washington Monthly\n“Politicians and corporations, among others, have made poor communities of color vulnerable to climate disasters. As Katrina: A History demonstrates, political and economic choices traded the present and future lives of Louisiana’s poor (and especially poor Black) people for unevenly distributed short-term gain…Attentive to history, Horowitz has harsh words for climate utopians who look for technological solutions to the city’s problems.”―Elias Rodriques, Bookforum\n“Calling upon a century of history to tell the story of what many Americans limit to a span of days or weeks, Horowitz’s Katrina is a devastating and important text for understanding the deep-seated inequality, infrastructure failure, and government carelessness that led to one of America’s worst disasters…Reading Horowitz in the age of COVID-19, as the powerful determine who and what are expendable, feels especially instructive.”―Andru Okun, Los Angeles Review of Books\n“The definitive portrait of the ‘causes and consequences’ of Hurricane Katrina. Horowitz brilliantly explores the disastrous links between warming temperatures, systemic racism, government mismanagement, and corporate greed. Few books better capture the monumental threat that climate change poses to America’s cities.”―Publishers Weekly\n“For those who are interested in getting through this current disaster by reading about other disasters…The whole idea is that

Katrina: A History, 1915-2015

History

Horowitz, Andy

Americas

Harvard

Winner of the Bancroft Prize A Publishers Weekly Best Nonfiction Book of the Year The definitive history of Katrina: an epic of citymaking, revealing how engineers and oil executives, politicians and musicians, and neighbors black and white built New Orleans, then watched it sink under the weight of their competing ambitions. Hurricane Katrina made landfall in New Orleans on August 29, 2005, but the decisions that caused the disaster extend across the twentieth 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. And so New Orleans grew in lowlands that relied on significant government subsidies to stay dry. When the flawed levee system surrounding the city and its suburbs failed, these were the neighborhoods that were devastated. The homes that flooded belonged to Louisianans black and white, rich and poor. Katrina's flood washed over the twentieth-century city. 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 reapportioned the challenges the water posed, making it easier for white New Orleanians to return home than it was for African Americans. And he explores how the profits and liabilities created by Louisiana's oil industry have been distributed unevenly among the state's citizens for a century, prompting both dreams of abundance--and a catastrophic land loss crisis that continues today. Laying bare the relationship between structural inequality and physical infrastructure--a relationship that has shaped all American cities--Katrina offers a chilling glimpse of the future disasters we are already creating.

Katrina: A History, 1915–2015

Harvard University Press

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Horowitz, Andy. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Horowitz, Andy

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Horowitz, Andy. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Katrina: A History, 1915-2015

Katrina: A History, 1915–2015