Publishing Up a Storm: Katrina Book Notes

Scarcely four months after Katrina's waters ebbed, Karla Starr was reeling back from the "title wave" of instant books spawned by the hurricane: "What gets squeezed out of the publication process from books released so soon after disasters is precisely what books alone can offer: thorough, investigative research conducted without regard to the stringent word-length or time constraints imposed by magazines or newspapers" (Willamette Week, January 11, 2006). Starr counted twenty books on the near horizon, on top of a cluster already on the shelves.

Ten months later, the printing frenzy has not yet played out. Most Katrina books have been slapped together too quickly to be remembered very long, and all of them bear at least a trace of haste. The list that follows does not pretend to completeness; some of the publication dates are approximate, estimated from conflicting sources.

The first titles out of the chute came too fast to be real books: rather, they were picture books, the photos alternating with snatches from news dispatches. There is little to say about these albums. Katrina: Stories of Rescue, Recovery, and Rebuilding in the Eye of the Storm (edited by Susan Moyer; Champagne, IL: Spotlight Books, September 2005) is the earliest I know: the photos and most of the copy were produced by Associated Press, with Agence France-Presse and the editor accounting for the balance. It wasn't long before other news services weighed in. Katrina. CNN Reports: State of Emergency (November 2005) is most notable for being a 100 per cent benefit book: all its earnings were forwarded to charity. TIME magazine's Hurricane Katrina: The Storm That Changed America (November 2005) was released almost concurrently with CNN's offering and followed within two months by the Dallas Morning News production, Eyes of the Storm: Hurricane Katrina and Rita, The Photographic Story (January 2006). Understandably, the photo books put together by New Orleanians required more time to emerge. Hurricane Katrina: The One We Feared (Hanrahan, LA: Express Publishing, February 2006) appeared without an author's or editor's name, but announced itself as the creation of a "New Orleans based business owned and operated by the Randazza family"; nevertheless, the contents are generic AP photos with normalized captions. As Katrina's first anniversary approached, the staff of the New Orleans Times-Picayune, which managed to publish throughout the catastrophe and earned a Pulitzer Prize for its efforts, released a more locally-textured picture essay: Katrina: The Ruin and Recovery of New Orleans (Spotlight Press, August 2006).

The next generation of Katrina books comprised short meditations, or anthologies of even shorter musings, crafted with such speed only because they were largely pre-written on the basis of long experience with the city, and most often by those writing from the distance of exile or academe.

Tom Piazza's Why New Orleans Matters (Regan Books, November 2005) was composed in one month's time in a cotton gin in the Missouri boot heel. Piazza had evacuated ahead of the storm, and after a few days staring in shock at the televised ruin of his city, answered a publisher's call to address the urgency of the times. The book's 192 tiny pages came together so quickly because most of them comprise an intimate memoir of Piazza's transformation from tourist to New Orleanian, an account of Why New Orleans Matters to him. Piazza celebrates the music, food, and festive life that lured him from New York City to the Crescent City. Only in the seventh of the book's eight chapters does he describe his return, two weeks in Katrina's wake, to the silent, eerie chaos that the floods had left behind. Chapter Eight opens up to raise the stakes and declare why New Orleans should matter to everybody. Expressing (well-founded) fears that urban engineers would try to transform New Orleans into yet another Disney World, Piazza pleads for us all to consider the city's poorer residents and the drowned neighborhoods that created the cultural pedestal upon which the French Quarter rests, and which—if swept away—will drown the...