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If you live in New Orleans, or anywhere that's hurricane-prone, it will take steely nerves to read about Patrina Peters.
She is the first person introduced in Breach of Faith, the latest history-in-the-making account of the monster storm that devastated the Gulf Coast less than a year ago.
As her New Orleans house succumbs to rushing waters and slumps off its foundations, Peters perches on a rooftop mattress, clinging to her daughter and waiting to die. She shouts a wrenching incantation into the howling wind: "Come by here, Lord. Come by here, Lord. I need you, my Lord. Come by here."
Peters survives Katrina and the ensuing breaching of the levee system, but more than 1,000 New Orleanians do not. Her story is one of many that author Jed Horne weaves into his wide-ranging, ambitious retelling of the Aug. 29 storm and its aftermath. Horne, metro editor of the New Orleans Times-Picayune, combines diverse eyewitness accounts with exhaustive reporting to tell a story that, in some ways, began not Aug. 29, 2005, but decades ago.
Horne was part of the team of reporters and editors who won two Pulitzer Prizes for Katrina coverage, and he captures with heartbreaking detail how unprepared New Orleans was for the disaster about to happen. Even those who heeded the first mandatory evacuation order in the city's history left with few belongings, assuming they would be home in a matter of days.
Horne makes his story compelling, often breathlessly suspenseful, though much of it has been told.
Blame for the bungled disaster response is shared, Horne writes, and his criticism of Mayor Ray Nagin, Gov. Kathleen Blanco and President Bush is evenhanded and unemotional. He also is careful to build a well-researched case that Katrina was not a natural disaster but a man-made one.
There is a lot of ground to cover in this enormously complex story, and Horne seems determined not to miss any angles. But it is the personal stories that make this a singular work.
There's Robert Zas, an eccentric resident of the unflooded Bywater neighborhood who loops razor wire around his mother's house as a "first perimeter" against looters. He creates a larger band of protection by putting out dog food on street corners to make sure that the strays would hang around and alert him if anyone should approach.
It feels as though the book ends not because the story ends, but because it's time to wrap things up and get the manuscript to the publisher ahead of the storm's one-year anniversary.
It will be interesting to read the books published years from now that actually answer some of the many important questions Horne raises.
Anne Rochell Konigsmark
covers New Orleans
for USA TODAY.
Breach of Faith:
Hurricane Katrina
and the Near Death
of a Great American City
By Jed Horne
Random House, 384 pp., $25.95
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© Copyright 2006 USA TODAY, a division of Gannett Co. Inc.
