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In The New York Times Book Review, Nathaniel Rich reviews Gary Rivlin’s “Katrina: After the Flood.” Mr. Rich writes:
New Orleanians have been hearing it for 10 years now: How’s New Orleans doing? Is it back? Is the Lower Ninth Ward … O.K.? The questioner takes the tentative, commiserating tone one might use to inquire about a friend’s infirm grandmother who, at last report, had been moved to hospice. The local, sighing, responds tersely: New Orleans is doing terrifically and terribly. It’s back but different and currently undergoing a furious transformation. Much of the Lower Ninth Ward is not O.K. But each of these answers requires a book-length footnote. If you really want to know how New Orleans is doing, you have to ask different questions.
Gary Rivlin asks many of them in “Katrina: After the Flood.” New Orleans’s evolution during the last decade has been just as instructive and astounding as the events surrounding the storm itself, but only now, on its 10th anniversary, are the first major accounts of the recovery beginning to emerge. Most are likely to insist that “recovery” isn’t the right word. What was lost won’t be entirely recovered. What will ultimately take its place remains largely unknown. Rivlin’s valuable book is among the first to relate, in clear and scrupulous detail, the decisions that have brought us this far, and to identify those who made them.
On this week’s podcast, Mr. Rivlin discusses “Katrina: After the Flood”; Alexandra Alter has news from the publishing world; Joe Domanick talks about “Blue: The LAPD and the Battle to Redeem American Policing”; and Gregory Cowles has best-seller news. Pamela Paul is the host.