Estimated read time: 3-4 minutes
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Douglas Brinkley's account of the natural and man-made disasters that were Hurricane Katrina indicts three public officials he holds most responsible for the chaos that followed the storm.
The Great Deluge blames "the incompetence of George W. Bush, who acted as though he were disinterested in a natural disaster in which there was no enemy to be found."
It says the inaction of Homeland Security chief Michael Chertoff "cost lives" and holds Chertoff more culpable than the much-ridiculed Michael Brown, the former FEMA director.
And it portrays New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin as gutless, paranoid and "cracking at the seams" when he needed to be decisive.
Even before the book's publication (it's in stores Tuesday), Nagin attacked Brinkley, based on an excerpt in the June issue of Vanity Fair. (Nagin is facing a mayoral runoff election May 20 against Lt. Gov. Mitch Landrieu.)
Brinkley, a best-selling historian at Tulane University in New Orleans and a protege of the late historian Stephen E. Ambrose, has written a week-long dramatic narrative. Its 716 pages are also a history lesson, political assessment and recycled journalism. It assumes that there can never be too many Katrina stories.
At times, Brinkley takes shortcuts. Without attribution, he reconstructs scenes he didn't witness. And some of the writing is over the top: "Rain was pelting the glass; the Grim Reaper was at their windowpane."
Brinkley describes a woman and her 80-year-old uncle clinging to a tree for seven hours, "hoping they would avoid what poet Robinson Jeffers called 'the seamouth of mortality.'" Is the poet really needed?
Some of the writing soars: Two days after the storm, "New Orleans didn't make sense anymore. ... Seniors were trembling all alone, left behind by careless family members on the absurd notion that they'd be okay. Many of them died in terrified solitude ... Just a mad rush of sewage water, filling up their lungs."
Brinkley praises unsung heroes, admires the media and documents how "the sinking of New Orleans was a man-made debacle" resulting from poorly designed levees and wetlands destruction. In the critical first week, he writes, "the local government was ill prepared and the federal government (was) uncaring."
If journalism is history's first draft, then The Great Deluge is draft 1.5. It's too close to the events to be history, but it's a step in that direction.
"History, in the end, is homage," Brinkley writes. "It's about caring enough to set the record straight even if reliving the past is painful or disappointing. ... Any politician involved with Katrina, who espouses the cliche that 'the blame game' is unnecessary is probably harboring a chestful of guilt."
No arguing with that, but Brinkley has written a big gumbo of a book. I like gumbo, a stew that includes okra, roux, rice, onions, peppers and usually chicken or seafood. The best gumbo I ever ate was in pre-Katrina New Orleans. But I prefer books with fewer ingredients.
The Great Deluge: Hurricane
Katrina, New Orleans,
and the Mississippi Gulf Coast
By Douglas Brinkley
Morrow, 716 pp., $29.95
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