Overcoming Katrina: African American Voices from the Crescent City and Beyond (review)

Overcoming Katrina: African American Voices from the Crescent City and Beyond is a rich collection of personal narratives of New Orleanians who battled Katrina—at home and away—and are now faced with rebuilding their lives either back home in New Orleans or in a new location. Wherever they chose to live now, the stories show that New Orleans remains at their heart and soul. This book is easy to read, but emotionally demanding.

Overcoming, the 16th in Palgrave Macmillan's Studies in Oral History series, consists of 27 stories, based on 275 interviews conducted by the authors between September 2005 and August 2008. There is a wealth of stories from shortly after the storm, and this reader was left wondering how the lives of the storytellers have changed since.

The book is divided into four stages of people's lives: Retirees (seven stories), At the Height of their Careers (eight stories), Thirty Something (eight stories), and Coming of Age (four stories). The authors say, "We have chosen to group the narratives by generation, but do not adhere to a strict age-based definition of a generation. Our generational categories depend on the individual's position in her work or life cycle" (p. xiii). Each generation brings a very different focus to the stories and experiences of Katrina; more stories from the younger generations would have strengthened the book.

Penner and Ferdinand are largely absent from the narratives, although one story concerns Ferdinand's personal experiences. Their in-text comments are set of with italics and are deliberately kept to a minimum, as are endnotes. As a result, the voices of those affected by the great storm of 2005 shine through in their own words and style. This also makes the book very accessible; the stories can be read in bite-sized pieces.

The interconnectedness of New Orleans' families is woven through the tales, as relatives relate experiences that overlap each other. Although more diversity would have added a different dimension to the book, there is sufficient variety in terms of class, geography, and history to conclude that this book truly encompasses the African American experience of Katrina in New Orleans.

The tales do a great job of portraying race in New Orleans. Retirees reflect vividly on the experiences of living in a racially segregated (by law as opposed to practice) New Orleans. Stories of racism arise across the generations, especially in evacuation stories; many of the storytellers recount their experiences of watching Whites evacuated quickly while they remained in hospitals, homes, expressways, the convention center, or the Superdome.

The authors deliberately chose to situate these narratives within the African American community for three reasons: sheer numbers of African Americans experiencing Katrina, the number of books following the storm written from a White perspective, and as a contrast to the often negative portrayals of Blacks in media after Katrina.

While academics will gain insight from the experiences shared in these narratives, this book is for everyone who wants to hear the truth about what happened in that awful week following Katrina's landfall. As the series editors say, "We read of victims, certainly, but also of full and complicated human beings, as Penner and Ferdinand wisely chose to place 'the Katrina story' within the context of a life story" (p. xi).