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 ... Humanists often overlook the importance of infrastructure when they write social history, but Horowitz vividly illustrates how it shapes life and land around it, in both planned and unplanned ways ... We see America as a failed state. But Horowitz’s analysis of the storm’s impact also contains surprises.
... brilliant ... his book is more than just an indictment of the disaster readiness of his precarious hometown, or a meditation on what it’s like to live in constant fear of biblical catastrophe. More than just a recounting of the history and aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, it is an argument for the relevance of history itself ... 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 ... Horowitz...muster[s] considerable evidence to argue that the 'pain' that came from Katrina was not 'fair, or natural, or inevitable,' or the 'consequence of some external disaster. It is the disaster itself.'
... easily the best book on the subject since Douglas Brinkley’s 2006 The Great Deluge: Hurricane Katrina, New Orleans, and the Mississippi Gulf Coast. Beyond delving into the tangled history of Louisiana politics, Horowitz’s book thoughtfully attempts to understand the cultural nature of these calamities ... an intriguing look at the social dynamics that so often play out in natural disasters ... 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.
... a story that is, regrettably, extremely relevant to our current debates regarding climate change, privatization, corruption, race, and inequality. In this thoroughly researched book of history, Katrina becomes an effective and easily comprehensible symbol of the failures of those in power to prevent human suffering, despite having the tools and resources to do so ...The story of Katrina, in the hands of Horowitz, is at once energizing and horrifying in its clarity and scope. The ease of reading such a dense history immediately shows that the author has been working on this subject with care, discipline, and a deep respect for primary sources for much of his career. The ability we have to prevent many of the effects of natural disaster is well documented, here, as well as our failure to prevent those effects that are caused by mismanagement, dismissal, and greed. Politics, real estate markets, energy production, climate change, racism: these are all covered with responsibility and a focus on fact. And without forgetting the people who experienced the disaster and its impact firsthand.
Horowitz, a political and environmental historian, pushes back on decontextualized narratives ... While the title of Horowitz’s book implies the existence of a definitive account, ascribing nonpareil authority to a single narrative is a flawed construct. The desire for a conclusive exposition of catastrophe comes from the impulse to comprehend what is impossible to grasp in aggregate. This is not to say that the author’s work isn’t exhaustive. 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.
... incisive ... As he convincingly demonstrates, Hurricane Katrina, and the response to destruction, highlighted the complex forces that led to disaster: 'canal building, coastal erosion, climate change, metropolitan subsidence, failed levees, mandatory evacuation, and decades of local, state, and federal housing policy' ... An eye-opening environmental history.
