Big Easy, where still writers run deep

Editors’ note: Five essential reads take unexpected angles on the 2005 storm and its disastrous aftermath.

The Great Deluge

Hurricane Katrina, New Orleans, and the Mississippi Gulf Coast

Douglas Brinkley

William Morrow: 716 pp., $29.95

“Brinkley captures the frenzy Katrina caused as it bore down on New Orleans� and provides “pungent details that most news organizations were too genteel to dwell on,� wrote our reviewer, Dante Ramos.

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New Orleans, Mon Amour

Twenty Years of Writings From the City

Andrei Codrescu

Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill: 276 pp., $14 paper

Though this essay collection ranges far and wide over New Orleans’ cultural history, reviewer Jervey Tervalon noted, the book culminates with “work written after Hurricane Katrina devastated the city. . . . These pieces are naked with grief.�

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Triksta

Life and Death and New Orleans Rap

Nik Cohn

Alfred A. Knopf: 212 pp., $22.95

The music writer’s memoir of his affection for the Big Easy may be a pre-Katrina book, yet it sheds an unexpected light. “The story winds through the clubs, the parties, the backroom studios,� reviewer Lynell George wrote, “offering a guided tour of the impoverished wards . . . hit hardest after Hurricane Katrina.�

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Storm World

Hurricanes, Politics, and the Battle Over Global Warming

Chris Mooney

Harcourt: 392 pp., $26

Besides being the year of Katrina, ’05 was the year that “many scientists started taking seriously the proposition that global warming could make hurricanes far worse than they are today,� reviewer Thomas Hayden wrote, “and that the 2005 season was just a taste of things to come.�

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Sugarcane Academy

Michael Tisserand

Harcourt/Harvest: 184 pp., $13 paper

A one-room schoolhouse started by the author and other Katrina evacuees is a moving example, reviewer Susan Salter Reynolds wrote, of “the hopefulness and ingenuity of the parents, students and teachers who created the school.� Readers learn how this vibrant experiment also struggled against “established policies and protocols that become roadblocks to spiritual and physical regeneration.�