The Great Deluge...just finished it. Recommended for anyone with

more than a passing interest in what was happening before, during and after Katrina..

what Nagin, Blanco, Bush and FEMA were doing..He tells some survivor's stories, talks about rescues, crimes, looting..but never seems to have an axe to grind with any ONE person or agency. It seems like a very fair reconstruction of what was actually happening on the ground in the gulf coast. He lives in New Orleans and is a history professor at Tulane so he is able to add some local insights.

If what he said about Nagin is true then IMHO people of NOLA were fools for reelecting him. But I'd like to have a few more sources before condemning Nagin. I was glad to read that cops and others in city government were pissed when Nagin took off for Dallas for several days the week after Katrina. I got pilloried here on DU when I expressed my outrage at that. They were calling Nagin "Dallas One" according to Brinkley.

I'd like to read this one too - Breach of Faith: Hurricane Katrina and the Near Death of a Great American City - I did note this author who is a Times-Picayune editor is not tough on Nagin. This is from Amazon.com

Horne, metro editor of the New Orleans Times-Picayune, writes with the clipped, raw urgency of a thriller writer in this humanist account of what happened after the levees broke. As already widely reported, residents who ignored the mandatory evacuation order (thinking "Katrina... had all the makings of a flop") quickly found themselves surrounded by bloated corpses floating in toxic floodwaters and without a consolidated rescue effort. Horne quickly moves past the melodrama of a striking disaster to recount the stories of individuals caught in the storm's hellish aftermath or mired in the government's hamstrung response: a Louisiana State University climatologist goes head-to-head with the Army Corps of Engineers over inadequate flood protection and faulty levees; a former Black Panther provides emergency health care at a local mosque. Horne saves his sharpest barbs for President Bush and the Department of Homeland Security ("if Homeland Security... was what stood between America and the next 9/11, then... America was in deep trouble") for failing to muster an appropriate response. Big disasters spawn big books, and though Horne's isn't the definitive account, it's an honest, angry and wrenching response to a massively bungled catastrophe. (July)
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From The Washington Post's Book World/washingtonpost.com
It is hard to imagine that, less than a year after the worst natural disaster in modern U.S. history, there would be much appetite for reliving the horrors of Hurricane Katrina -- manmade or otherwise. And it is equally difficult to imagine encountering anything fresh on a subject that's been so thoroughly dissected. Yet in this solid if somewhat detached recounting, New Orleans journalist Jed Horne has provided new insights into how a ferocious storm, governmental ineptitude and racially tinged inequities conspired to permanently jeopardize one of the nation's cultural gems.
Breach of Faith begins and ends at the Lower Ninth Ward home of Patrina Peters, 43, a resilient African American mother of two who's disabled by epilepsy, a heart condition and Crohn's disease. With Katrina barreling up the Gulf Coast, it is Peters, holed up in the "camelback"-style house that had been in her family for generations, who eerily sets the stage. Exactly 40 years earlier, she recalls, Hurricane Betsy cut a similar course, killing 75 people and decimating much of the historic black neighborhood. "I have a funny feeling about this," Peters tells her daughter.

From Peters's pre-storm premonition, Horne catalogues the catastrophe in almost hour-by-hour fashion. From the early, misplaced sighs of relief that New Orleans had "dodged a bullet" to the mid-storm mayhem to the hideous finger-pointing by impotent officials, Horne paints in vivid detail what amounted not to just one disaster but to disaster piled upon disaster.

Nagin does get the lion's share, at least for not ordering a mandatory evacuation much earlier and for not taking the storm seriously enough. But I haven't yet gotten to the part after the storm so I haven't read what he has to say about FEMA. My guess is he spares no one.

Nobody got off without some blame.

I live in Southern Louisiana and thought it was a great book. I have not read any other "Katrina" books yet, so I can not compare it. I do think Mr. Brinkley handed out the blame equally to all that where involved. What I like was Mr. Brinkley's ability to take to right to the places he was writhing about.