I borrowed this one from the UHD Library.

See my note on the book:

[http://itinerantlibrarian.blogspot.com/2006/12/booknote-come-hell-or-high-water.html] ( )

This book was nothing more than a ridiculous attempt to place blame on anyone and everyone besides the people who should be blamed. Katrina was a horrific occurance but to blatantly state that the events that occured did so because of race is ignorant and wrong. Furthermore, Dyson seems to love to stereotype white Americans, while placing absolutely no blame on those individuals who refused to evacuate the area. In short...I hated this book and would gladly give it away! ( )

Every American should read this book.

Let me repeat myself: Every American should read this book.

I don't agree with much of Mr. Dyson's politics. I question his implicit assumption that capitalism is inherently racist, and I believe he goes a little too far out of his way to excuse bad behavior in his discussion of framing issues.

However. This book is a glaring indictment of emergency management in the United States, of our lack of preparedness from the top on down; it is a glaring indictment of the Bush administration, cronyism, disaster capitalism, and a war which has removed precious domestic resources to a far away continent. Mostly, it is a screaming litany against the structural classism and racism implicit in American society and culture. Mr. Dyson hits the nail on the head with his recognition that we all have played a role in systematically ignoring the lower classes in America, and allowing such a situation as the aftermath of Katrina to occur in our nation.

This is a tough book to read, as it recalls to mind all of the horrific images which were so prominent when the floods rolled into the city of New Orleans. If you have a heart, you will cry while reading this book. Probably multiple times. You will also find yourself occassionally furious, and needing to put it away for an hour, a day, or a week. But ultimately, the lessons of Katrina are too dear for us to ignore, and if we don't take this opportunity to see them, and do something about them, then we are not only responsible, but complicit, in the oppression and destruction of an entire segment of our population.

Some highlights of Come Hell or High Water include an informative look at the legislative history of American disaster management, an insightful examination of theodicy and its impact on interpretations of Katrina, two chapters right in the middle (5 & 6) which pinpoint to a disgusting specificity just how much was known, and when, about the vulnerability of the Crescent City, who made the decisions not to do things - both before and after the storm hit, and the extent to which disaster capitalism in the form of emergency legislation and no-bid contracting allowed corporate America to get rich off of the misery of an entire community who were stranded on rooftops in a 20-foot storm surge.

Read this book. Digest it. And whatever you do, don't forget. ( )

Who else wasn't glued to their television set, or the newspapers, or their internet, or whatever, last late August into early September? It's not everyday that we see a city destroyed by a combination of a hurricane and government ineptitude. It's the second major disaster in just four years in the United States, after the attacks on the World Trade Center that killed 2000 people. Hurricane Katrina and the lackluster FEMA response killed 1,836, plus 705 people unaccounted for, as of May 19th, 2006. There was a rapid response to 9-11 attacks, when the victims were mostly white affluent people. There was a slow, too-little, too late response to Hurricane Katrina, when the victims were mostly poor and black. Today, fewer than half of New Orlean's population has returned, since many of them have nothing to return to.

Michael Eric Dyson, the author of "Is Bill Cosby Right?", writes in "Come Hell or High Water" of the meaning of the disaster. While it is true that Bush, Mike Brown, and local Louisiana politicians did not cause Hurricane Katrina, (though the magnitude of the hurricane was most likely highly worsened by global climate change), they certainly were responsible for the hundreds of thousands of people being stranded in New Orleans when help started arriving nearly five days afterwards.

Dyson spends much time exploring the cultural response of the mainstream to the hurricane, with the glaring implications of race in America. In a desperate situation with little hope for help, people in New Orleans began to take food from stores which had been abandoned in the wake of the hurricane. The media shortly separated the Black people trying to feed themselves into "looters" and the whites as "finding food". An absurd amount of attention became focused on people using the opportunity to take televisions and radios, though the media ignores the fact that people may have sold these appliances later on for food. The disaster of the Superdome, where 30,000 people waited for days while the Red Cross was turned away by the national guard because New Orleans was "too dangerous" (which later turned out to be mostly based on rumor.)

Hurricane Katrina seemed like the world turned upside down, but it really just brought already messed up situations, like white supremacy and capitalism, to be magnified ten-fold. I keep wondering why they didn't just evacuate everyone, and it turns out that Amtrak offered to provide free trains, but the city turned it down. The Levees weren't funded properly, leading to detoriation and busting up. FEMA didn't know what was going on, and followed every little procedure by the book, leading to necessary help not happening for days (for instance, FEMA officials were instructed not to help any locals unless they asked for help.) Later, a Lousina representative declared (off-the record) "We finally cleared up that public housing problem…"

For a step-by-step detailed look into what happened in the Deep South in August of 2005, pick this up, and prepare to shake your head in bewilderment at the people who run the United States. Reggie Bush or no, New Orleans has been forever changed.

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