Breach of Faith 

 
Jed Horne's Breach of Faith is the fourth book I have read about Hurricane Katrina. If this officially qualifies my interest in this subject as an obsession, so be it.

This book plugs some of the holes left by other books on the subject, but I am still left saying that a definitive book has yet to be written. And it may not be until some time has passed.

 Horne opens Breach of Faith the way most disaster books tend to open -- with anecdotes. He intertwines several storm stories in the early chapters, and from there moves on to more big picture topics. Horne does not make the same mistake David Brinkley made in The Great Deluge, which was to include so many personal hurricane accounts that at times the overall story was lost. On the other hand, Horne has a habit of telling someone's story for a few pages, then leaving it off for a chapter or two, then going back to it, and this sometimes confused me. I found myself often going back to figure out which victim story he was talking about.

In the end, Mr. Horne performs a great service by fleshing out the most important part of the Hurricane Katrina story -- what happened after it happened. Katrina week played out on televisions throughout the globe, but so far, only Horne has discussed the early recovery efforts, their successes, and their failures in anything approaching a comprehensive fashion. It strikes me that the most important part of the Katrina story is not the spectacular failure of the rescue effort, but that after the water was pumped out the recovery failed just as badly. As a doctor says late in the book, more people will die from chronic medical problems because Katrina destroyed the indigent health care system in south Louisiana than died in the storm itself. In making these observations Horne is spot on, and quite right to spend at least half the book on the subject. In fact, I wish he had spent even more.

My complaint is that Horne, after rightly taking up this important subject, wraps up the book in the spring of 2006. While I understand the need to get a book to press, Horne does not even take us as far as the New Orleans mayorial election in May of 2006. He ends before the establishment of a temporary Charity Hospital in Elmwood that following summer, and says little or nothing about the drastic changes in the public school system that same spring. He even ended before final passage of the Louisiana Road Home program, a federally funded effort to rebuild destroyed homes. I recognize that adding these topics would have made the book much longer and more complicated, but it also would have made it more complete. Somehow everything wraps up in mid-air. Perhaps Horne felt that in leaving things this way he was conveying the anxiety that hangs over the city of New Orleans to this day. He does do that, but the story feels incomplete nonetheless.

None of these criticisms should be taken to mean that this book is not worthwhile reading. It is. It looks at the subject with the proper balance most Katrina books lack, and it recounts with considerable skill the politics that has complicated the recovery effort. 

One surprise: Like David Brinkley, Horne seems to feel Louisiana Governor Kathleen Blanco has done a much better job in the aftermath of the storm than she has been given credit for. I wish Horne had gone into a little more detail about this, but from what I am gathering most of the people who knew Blanco well think her performance was grossly underestimated.  

I hope Mr. Horne publishes a sequel, or an updated version. His observations and writing are quite strong, and I think he could write the complete story of Katrina.