High Water Everywhere

On Monday 29 August, Hurricane Katrina tore into the Gulf coast, utterly destroying the city of New Orleans, leaving an unknown number of dead and hundreds of thousands of people homeless in its wake. In the days that followed, the world watched aghast as the poor and dispossessed of the city were left to fester amid the ruins, without food or water, prey to disease, starvation and lawlessness, issuing increasingly desperate pleas for help. It was as if a destitute corner of the Third World had suddenly erupted in the heart of the USA. As the Bush administration lurched from paralysis to hysteria and then on to cold-eyed commercialism, opening the doors to corporate contractors familiar from the "re-building" of Iraq, it became clear that what had been exposed by the fury of the elements was that Third World conditions already existed in New Orleans, as in countless other cities across North America, and that the richest nation in the world had long ago turned its back on them. Alexander Cockburn and Jeffrey St Clair tell the full story of a dignified city smashed to matchwood by a hurricane.
From its origins in the days of slavery and its defining status as the home of jazz and the blues, through a long history of social neglect, to the disaster itself: the horrors of the Superdome, the media reaction, the political blame-game, and the future of half a million refugees consigned to makeshift trailer parks and a future as uncertain as their past. This is the book that all those who believe that something very wrong was exposed by Hurricane Katrina will want to read.