The Great Deluge - by Douglas Brinkley Paperback

About the Book

A New Orleans resident and history professor at Tulane University, Brinkley rips the story of Hurricane Katrina apart and exposes the failures, ulterior motives, and inexperience that allowed the Katrina disaster to devastate the Gulf Coast. 16-page color insert.

From the Back Cover

In the span of five violent hours on August 29, 2005, Hurricane Katrina destroyed major Gulf Coast cities and flattened 150 miles of coastline. But it was only the first stage of a shocking triple tragedy. On the heels of one of the three strongest hurricanes ever to make landfall in the United States came the storm-surge flooding, which submerged a half-million homes--followed by the human tragedy of government mismanagement, which proved as cruel as the natural disaster itself.

In The Great Deluge, bestselling author Douglas Brinkley finds the true heroes of this unparalleled catastrophe, and lets the survivors tell their own stories, masterly allowing them to record the nightmare that was Katrina.

Review Quotes

"Written with verve and energy, this is Brinkley's best book to date." - Times Picayune
"'The Great Deluge, ' captures the human toll of Katrina as graphically as the most vivid newspaper and television accounts" - New York Times Book Review
"The first historical book that has researched the available record on Katrina and is the closest to actual fact." - Gov. Kathleen Blanco
"An impassioned argument for sustained national interest in the aftermath of a catastrophe." - The Advocate
"More dispassionate and analytical books will be written about Katrina, few will capture the human drama as well as Brinkley's." - Financial Times
"An important, poignant and often-infuriating look at the tragedy." - Denver Post
"...likely to be the [account] against which other treatments of the subject will be judged." - Daily Advertiser
"You can call "The Great Deluge" history, or you can call it journalism. But it's good stuff" - St. Louis Post-Dispatch
"If you've grown numb to the horror of Katrina, this will wake you up. It's a stirring and important book." - The Arizona Republic
"A microhistory [that] provides a ground-level view of human behavior far richer than the breathless news reports that stunned and shamed the nation in the summer of 2005." - New York Times Book Review
"Likely to be the [account] against which other treatments of the subject will be judged." - Washington Times
"...likely to be the [account] against which other treatments of the subject will be judged." - Washington Times
"Doug Brinkley's chronicle of Hurricane Katrina has the drama and desperation of a Russian novel, the government intrigue of a Washington whodunit, and a keen sense of history and context due to the author's standing not only as a journalist and historian but as a New Orleans native." - Graydon Carter
"Doug Brinkley's chronicle of Hurricane Katrina has a keen sense of history and context" - Graydon Carter
"[A] riveting story" - Cokie Roberts
"[A] magnificent new book." - The Times (Shreveport, Louisiana)