The Great Deluge: Hurricane Katrina, New Orleans, and the Mississippi Gulf Coast (Paperback)

Description

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In the span of five violent hours on August 29, 2005, Hurricane Katrina destroyed major Gulf Coast cities and flattened 150 miles of coastline. But it was only the first stage of a shocking triple tragedy. On the heels of one of the three strongest hurricanes ever to make landfall in the United States came the storm-surge flooding, which submerged a half-million homes—followed by the human tragedy of government mismanagement, which proved as cruel as the natural disaster itself.

In The Great Deluge, bestselling author Douglas Brinkley finds the true heroes of this unparalleled catastrophe, and lets the survivors tell their own stories, masterly allowing them to record the nightmare that was Katrina.

About the Author

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Douglas Brinkley is the Katherine Tsanoff Brown Chair in Humanities and Professor of History at Rice University, a CNN Presidential Historian, and a contributing editor at Vanity Fair.  In the world of public history, he serves on boards, at museums, at colleges, and for historical societies. The Chicago Tribune dubbed him “America’s New Past Master.” The New-York Historical Society has chosen Brinkley as its official U.S. Presidential Historian. His recent book Cronkite won the Sperber Prize, while The Great Deluge: Hurricane Katrina, New Orleans, and the Mississippi Gulf Coast received the Robert F. Kennedy Book Award. He was awarded a Grammy for Presidential Suite and is the recipient of seven honorary doctorates in American studies. His two-volume, annotated Nixon Tapes recently won the Arthur S. Link–Warren F. Kuehl Prize. He is a member of the Century Association, the Council on Foreign Relations, and the James Madison Council of the Library of Congress. He lives in Austin, Texas, with his wife and three children.

 www.douglasbrinkley.com

Praise For…

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“‘The Great Deluge,’ captures the human toll of Katrina as graphically as the most vivid newspaper and television accounts”
— New York Times Book Review

“Doug Brinkley’s chronicle of Hurricane Katrina has a keen sense of history and context”
— Graydon Carter

“[A] riveting story”
— Cokie Roberts

“The first historical book that has researched the available record on Katrina and is the closest to actual fact.”
— Gov. Kathleen Blanco

“More dispassionate and analytical books will be written about Katrina, few will capture the human drama as well as Brinkley’s.”
— Financial Times

“An important, poignant and often-infuriating look at the tragedy.”
— Denver Post

“Written with verve and energy, this is Brinkley’s best book to date.”
— Times Picayune

“…likely to be the [account] against which other treatments of the subject will be judged.”
— Washington Times

“An impassioned argument for sustained national interest in the aftermath of a catastrophe.”
— The Advocate

“…likely to be the [account] against which other treatments of the subject will be judged.”
— Daily Advertiser

“You can call “The Great Deluge” history, or you can call it journalism. But it’s good stuff”
— St. Louis Post-Dispatch

“If you’ve grown numb to the horror of Katrina, this will wake you up. It’s a stirring and important book.”
— The Arizona Republic