Adam wrote: "The storm that devastated my hometown," & "history of Katrina victims"
The storm devastated? No Adam, that is a lie. Why are you perpetuating this evil myth? Do you want history recorded with fiction rather than fact? If ours was your hometown, cannot you be fair to those you left behind? Or, are you just another lazy journalist?
Our outfall canal floodwalls fell down without even being overtopped (at less than half their design loads) because of negligent engineering in the design of those floodwalls' foundations by engineers employed with the US Army Corps of Engineers as reported in the official levee failure investigation reports and reported to Congress by Corps leadership in June of 2006 and as decided by US 5th District Judge S. Duval in 2008.
It was a man made disaster. This book, a creative work, and all the others about 'Katrina' never would have been written had the levees not failed due to extreme engineering negligence.
The levee failures and subsequent flooding were NOT because of our corrupt local levee boards and politicians or because of weak soil, barges, wind, rain, land elevation, levee heights, budgets, democrats, republicans, violent crime, an act of God, school buses, our culture, environmentalists, neighborhood groups. It wasn't even caused by FEMA, our Sewage and Water Board or our state's Department of Transportation, or our poverty, lack of education or any of the other red herring issues very successfully promoted by so many. It was not the fault of flood victims.
The levees did not fail because they were 'overwhelmed'. Federal engineers made lots of big stupid mistakes. Our disaster was the worst engineering catastrophe in the history of North America and the engineers that designed and built and were responsible for those failed levees are the same engineers tasked to rebuild our storm surge protection system. And, the federal government gives us no choice (and never did), but to accept the Corps' work.
Honestly, language like you used is why we still cry about Katrina. We've been relentlessly slandered and feel very disillusioned because of fellow countrymen like you.
An Imperfect Storm
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I never knew that a person could actually be bored to tears until I read Josh Neufeld's new graphic book about Hurricane Katrina. A.D.: New Orleans After the Deluge follows five real-life storylines in the lead-up to, and immediate aftermath of, the storm. The illustrations are acceptable, the narrative structure is unimaginative, the characters merit only the briefest (often reductive) treatment, and I whipped through it in an hour. And yet I wept. Twice.
How could I not? A calamity like Katrina just oozes tragedy. Come to think of it, all the best graphic novels use this cheat, too: Art Spiegelman's Maus is a biography of his father's Holocaust epic; Marjane Satrapi's Persepolis chronicles her childhood after Iran's revolution; and Joe Sacco has carved out a specialty in ethnic-conflict comics, from Bosnia (three books) to Palestine (two by 2010). Behind them all is an implicit argument by their authors that disasters like these deserve art that is more cinematic than books, but more literary than film. And these works really do deliver.
Like them, A.D. is full of pathos. Even prosaic hardships—a couple anguishing over what to save and what to abandon from their Mid-City home—feel monumentally hopeless. Neufeld's most wrenching panels illustrate a frame in time, but they also evoke a more generalized horror. A two-page spread depicts the moment when several exasperated women—who rode out the flood in a city hospital—are deposited, along with thousands of other refugees, at the convention center. But the real pathos in the wide-angle panel is in feeling the resignation and panic that must have been seething through the homeless, dehydrated crowd, basting in sweat and hoping in vain for deliverance.
Yet if the gravity of A.D. comes just from retelling a well-known saga, does that merit a graphic treatment? The storm that devastated my hometown, like the Holocaust, is a heartbreaking story. Neufeld didn't discover this; he just put it to work for him. Is it any wonder, then, that none of the form's triumphs are about everyday life? There is no Updike of the graphic novel. The closest—Harvey Pekar, whose American Splendor series explores his pedestrian travails—works in vignettes because his life, without a built-in catastrophe, sustains only a limited narrative.
And so what Neufeld lacks in virtuosity or originality he has to deliver through verisimilitude: his graphic "novel" is really a piece of reportage. (Though, having shacked up with his subjects during reporting trips, he wouldn't have cleared NEWSWEEK's ethics policy.) Maybe in a vacuum that's good enough to make A.D. illuminating. But not on a subject that has produced pitch-perfect elegies like Dan Baum's Nine Lives, a history of Katrina victims that follows roughly the same conceit to infinitely lusher effect.
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