Katrina : A History, 1915-2015

Winner of the Bancroft PrizeLouisiana Endowment for the Humanities Book of the YearA Publishers Weekly Book of the Year“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.”-Nicholas Lemann, New YorkerHurricane Katrina made landfall in New Orleans on August 29, 2005, but the decisions that caused the disaster can be traced back nearly a century.After the city weathered a major hurricane in 1915, its Sewerage and Water Board believed that developers could safely build housing near the Mississippi, on lowlands that relied on significant government subsidies to stay dry.When the flawed levee system failed, these were the neighborhoods that were devastated. 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 made it easi