I perused this book a bit while the rest of our book club locates the book, and I was horrified at what I read in the Introduction. Granted, I wasn't all that involved in any relief efforts after the hurricane struck, but I expected to be informed a bit more about what exactly was going on in New Orleans and the surrounding areas. I knew of the evacuation to the Astrodome in Houston, but I had never heard of the horrifying events that occurred at evacuation site nearer to the city itself. I feel as though the country at large was woefully uninformed of the catastrophes within the catastrophe. Corpses rotting on the sidewalks? Young girls being raped? Doctors operating without electricity or sanitary conditions? I had no idea any of this happened. I feel horribly ignorant and small-minded to admit it, but it's true. Perhaps I was too young to understand, or too busy with navigating my own way through the floodwaters of my first year of high school to really comprehend the magnitude of the horror that was Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath. Natural disaster made an entire city go completely insane.
Granted, that is not really what this book is meant to be about; it is an examination of the loss and reconstruction of a culture, and the iconic characteristics of a city that were washed away in the blink of an eye. But the Introduction was useful in setting the scene for what monstrous force could actually make a people forget who they are and spiral down into the lowest incarnation of humanity. I look forward to reading more of Piazza's discussion of this phenomenon and its remedies. It looks to be promising, having read thus far.
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