Water Damaged: Disaster History in New Orleans and on the Gulf Coast

John Barry. The Great Mississippi Flood of 1927 and How It Changed America. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1998. 524 pp. Illustrations, notes, and index. $16.00.

Erik Larson. Isaac's Storm: A Man, A Time, and the Deadliest Hurricane in History. New York: Crown, 2000. 336 pp. Illustrations, notes, and index. $25.00 (cloth); $14.00 (paper).

The hurricane slammed into the city, with sustained winds of more than 150 miles per hour. Mundane objects became deadly as they hurtled through the air. Flying bricks, for instance, killed several people unlucky enough to be caught outside. Roofs blew off and traveled for miles. Buildings collapsed from the pressure of the gale. And then the flood came, carrying away whole blocks of houses, erasing entire neighborhoods. The aftermath was no better: searching for corpses amidst the wreckage of ruined lives; cataloging the missing, while hoping a child, a sibling, a cousin, a friend might turn up despite the long odds; worrying about disease, insult atop injury; and considering what sort of future a place so badly damaged might have in a new century.

Sound familiar? The following may strike as close to home.

When the floodwaters came, they lingered, leaving not just a single city but parts of an entire region under water for months. Hundreds of thousands of victims lost their homes, beginning a mass migration too huge and disparate to be measured accurately, a sudden diaspora stretching across the country. White skin and class privilege insulated many people from the worst perils. People of color, the impoverished, the elderly, and the frail suffered disproportionately. But there was plenty of anguish to cut through all social strata. Media descended; journalists provided non-stop coverage that captivated the nation and helped shift the political landscape for years. Onlookers, overwhelmed by the scope of the calamity, opened bibles to the Book of Revelations.

Despite countless parallels, neither of these descriptions refers to the impact of Hurricane Katrina. Instead, both are composite sketches—first of Galveston's 1900 hurricane and then of the 1927 Mississippi River flood—drawn from books that have renewed significance in these seasons of catastrophe. The country is still grappling with the magnitude and meaning of a disaster so massive that it, even months later, seems incomprehensible. Context might help. Eric Larson's Isaac's Storm: A Man, A Time, and the Deadliest Hurricane in History and John Barry's Rising Tide: The Great Mississippi Flood of 1927 and How It Changed America provide this context. If these books aren't entirely comforting, they at least suggest that the struggles facing the Gulf Coast today are not without precedent. For this reason alone, they merit attention. They're also page-turners, expertly crafted genre pieces—works of literary non-fiction—so a wide variety of readers will be engaged by their content.

In 1900, Galveston was perched on the brink of greatness. Its setting was breathtaking. Situated on an island off the Texas coast, the town was built right on the shores of the Gulf of Mexico. It was a medium-sized city for the era, boasting a year-round population of fewer than forty thousand people. Its residents, though, were unusually wealthy and well educated. Its port had recently become the world's busiest handler of cotton, a staple that if no longer King in the South was still part of a royal family of commodities. Buoyed by the region's cotton trade, Galveston boasted some of the South's most beautiful homes and a thriving business district. Culturally, it was outsized: the city had fashioned itself into a hub of music, good food, and theater. Turn-of-the-century Galveston was confident, certain of its bright prospects.

Into this optimistic scene, the anonymous—storms weren't named in the United States until World War II—hurricane of 1900 roared. Larson is writer enough to recognize drama...