An affecting firsthand account of a mayor trying to pull his city back from the brink.
Former New Orleans mayor Nagin presents his side of the Hurricane Katrina story.
In the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, as New Orleans struggled to rebuild itself nearly from scratch, there was a fair amount of finger-pointing in the press and among the public figures involved. Clearly someone had failed the city, 80% of which was covered in floodwater thanks to broken levees, and its most vulnerable residents, thousands of whom were forced to live in filthy, dangerous conditions in the Superdome stadium and the city’s convention center. The federal government was in charge of maintaining the now-useless levees. The Federal Emergency Management Agency didn’t realize the gravity of the situation at the time and failed to deliver much-needed supplies. The state government held back desperately needed National Guard troops. And, of course, there was the local government. Nagin, who was mayor when the storm hit, presents the argument that, since this disaster was so unprecedented in scope, there was no way the city could have adequately prepared. According to Nagin, given its limited resources and the extent of the damage, the city never had a chance to get ahead of the disaster, especially since help wasn’t exactly forthcoming from the outside, either. Nagin, whose prose is competent if not lyrical, describes a detached FEMA—which bought into early press reports that downplayed the disaster—a federal government too focused on saving face to provide any real help and a state government so interested in looking “tough” that it refused to let the Feds take charge of the recovery. Nagin provides key insight into several turning points in the unfolding disaster, including his famous, somewhat profane cry for help to a call-in radio show, which made those outside New Orleans realize the extent of the disaster for the first time. While any memoir written by a politician should be taken with copious amounts of salt, the author presents a strong case for himself and his staff, describing how they worked against impossible odds to save the city and fought petty politics that deprived them of much-needed outside assistance.
An affecting firsthand account of a mayor trying to pull his city back from the brink.Pub Date: June 22, 2011
ISBN: 978-1460959718
Page Count: 330
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Aug. 12, 2011
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.
Greed, depravity, and serial murder in 1920s Oklahoma.
During that time, enrolled members of the Osage Indian nation were among the wealthiest people per capita in the world. The rich oil fields beneath their reservation brought millions of dollars into the tribe annually, distributed to tribal members holding "headrights" that could not be bought or sold but only inherited. This vast wealth attracted the attention of unscrupulous whites who found ways to divert it to themselves by marrying Osage women or by having Osage declared legally incompetent so the whites could fleece them through the administration of their estates. For some, however, these deceptive tactics were not enough, and a plague of violent death—by shooting, poison, orchestrated automobile accident, and bombing—began to decimate the Osage in what they came to call the "Reign of Terror." Corrupt and incompetent law enforcement and judicial systems ensured that the perpetrators were never found or punished until the young J. Edgar Hoover saw cracking these cases as a means of burnishing the reputation of the newly professionalized FBI. Bestselling New Yorkerstaff writer Grann (The Devil and Sherlock Holmes: Tales of Murder, Madness, and Obsession, 2010, etc.) follows Special Agent Tom White and his assistants as they track the killers of one extended Osage family through a closed local culture of greed, bigotry, and lies in pursuit of protection for the survivors and justice for the dead. But he doesn't stop there; relying almost entirely on primary and unpublished sources, the author goes on to expose a web of conspiracy and corruption that extended far wider than even the FBI ever suspected. This page-turner surges forward with the pacing of a true-crime thriller, elevated by Grann's crisp and evocative prose and enhanced by dozens of period photographs.
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.Pub Date: April 18, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-385-53424-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
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