As a high school teacher I found it part of my civic responsibility to expose my students to many of the fine investigative articles done by the “Times-Picayune” during that first year after Katrina. My students and I also read all of the first-published books on Katrina issued beginning in the spring after the storm. We also read one published long before and reissued after Katrina, Ted Steinberg’s “Acts of God: The Unnatural History of Natural Disaster in America.”

I exposed my students to the fifteen-year-long effort from key individuals to inform our local public and the government of the risks that coastal errosion and levee degredation repersented. I carefully stressed that much of these efforts consisted of pleas to Washington to beef-up our flood protection system which fell on deaf ears due to neoliberalism’s successful efforts to undo the New Deal. The degredation of progressive taxation has not been painless for most Americans. Perhaps we in south Louisiana have suffered the most from this shift in policy. The crop of students on whom I spent my own efforts are all either just out of college or in their final years of higher education. Knowing that Americans’ political memories are typically two years in length, I wonder what–if anything–has stuck.

Recently finishing Thomas Frank’s thorough analysis of how the right rules in the USA, “The Wrecking Crew,” I must comment that much of what I and my students read about four years ago is not simply inept, benign bungling. It all had a synister side. I recommend the reading of “Acts of God” and “The Wrecking Crew” as companion pieces to anyone desiring a broad and deep view of what we in south Louisiana have been through and continue to deal with. Our experiences have implications for the rest of the nation.

Finally, these two books, because they are both written by trained historians, provide analysis founded in careful documentation and strong, well articulated argument. Even in amnesiac culture the historical point of view has power.

I would like to hear from Mr. Egan himself. I feel I owe him a deserved opportunity to explain his story on why he wrote the events as he first presented them. I feel I owe him that.

Sandy Rosenthal, wife, mother, New Orleans resident and founder of Levees.org

And, the overtopping which we are referring to, would have introduced a limited amount of water into those flood zones, but the corps designs levees to breach when overtopped (isn’t that absurd) and the result was an infinite amount of water in New Orleans East, The Lower Ninth Ward and St. Bernard.

These things are often very difficult for outsiders to understand or even insiders without a good understanding of relevant engineering. -especially when that person has ingrained existing opinions on mother nature, natural disasters, land below sea level or the almighty genius of all ‘engineers’ and the mythical role of politicians in our disaster. There really is no valid excuse for these structures’ failures. This is simply an example of how the Corps does their work without consideration of common sense or lives or the welfare of citizens.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/16/books/review/Egan-t.html?_r=1

Correction: September 6, 2009
A review on Aug. 16 about “Zeitoun,” Dave
Eggers’s account of the experiences of a
New Orleans contractor, Abdulrahman
Zeitoun, during and after Hurricane Katrina
in 2005, referred imprecisely to some
aspects of the storm. While there were
strong winds and heavy rain at Zeitoun’s
house on the evening of Aug. 28, the
hurricane didn’t “hit” on that date; it
made landfall in Louisiana in the early
hours of Aug. 29. And while Katrina was at
one point a Category 5 storm, by the time
of landfall, it was Category 3.

The review also referred incompletely to
the subsequent flooding of New Orleans.
While some of it was indeed the direct
result of overtopping of the levees, a
larger portion was due to their structural
failure.