{"product_id":"breach-of-faith-isbn-9780812976502","title":"Breach of Faith","description":"Hurricane Katrina shredded one of the great cities of the South, and as levees failed and the federal relief effort proved lethally incompetent, a natural disaster became a man-made catastrophe. As an editor of New Orleans’ daily newspaper, the Pulitzer Prize—winning \u003ci\u003eTimes-Picayune\u003c\/i\u003e, Jed Horne has had a front-row seat to the unfolding drama of the city’s collapse into chaos and its continuing struggle to survive.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eAs the Big One bore down, New Orleanians rich and poor, black and white, lurched from giddy revelry to mandatory evacuation. The thousands who couldn’t or wouldn’t leave initially congratulated themselves on once again riding out the storm. But then the unimaginable happened: Within a day 80 percent of the city was under water. The rising tides chased horrified men and women into snake-filled attics and onto the roofs of their houses. Heroes in swamp boats and helicopters braved wind and storm surge to bring survivors to dry ground. Mansions and shacks alike were swept away, and then a tidal wave of lawlessness inundated the Big Easy. Screams and gunshots echoed through the blacked-out Superdome. Police threw away their badges and joined in the looting. Corpses drifted in the streets for days, and buildings marinated for weeks in a witches’ brew of toxic chemicals that, when the floodwaters finally were pumped out, had turned vast reaches of the city into a ghost town.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eHorne takes readers into the private worlds and inner thoughts of storm victims from all walks of life to weave a tapestry as intricate and vivid as the city itself. Politicians, thieves, nurses, urban visionaries, grieving mothers, entrepreneurs with an eye for quick profit at public expense–all of these lives collide in a chronicle that is harrowing, angry, and often slyly ironic.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eEven before stranded survivors had been plucked from their roofs, government officials embarked on a vicious blame game that further snarled the relief operation and bedeviled scientists striving to understand the massive levee failures and build New Orleans a foolproof flood defense. As Horne makes clear, this shameless politicization set the tone for the ongoing reconstruction effort, which has been haunted by racial and class tensions from the start.\u003cbr\u003eKatrina was a catastrophe deeply rooted in the politics and culture of the city that care forgot and of a nation that forgot to care. In \u003ci\u003eBreach of Faith\u003c\/i\u003e, Jed Horne has created a spellbinding epic of one of the worst disasters of our time.Jed Horne, a metro editor of \u003ci\u003eThe Times-Picayune\u003c\/i\u003e, was awarded a Pulitzer Prize for his part in the paper’s coverage of Hurricane Katrina. His book\u003ci\u003e Desire Street: A True Story of Death and Deliverance in New Orleans\u003c\/i\u003e was nominated for the 2006 Edgar Award for nonfiction crime writing. He lives in the French Quarter with his wife.one\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    A Camille on Betsy’s Track\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    The big old camelback house on Lamanche Street was home to Patrina Peters, and had been for most of her forty-three years. Her parents   lived in one of the paired front-to-back apartments that made up the   ground floor—“shotgun” apartments in local parlance, because of their   long, narrow layout. Zip, her brother’s widow, had stayed on in the other downstairs apartment after Kevin’s sudden death from a heart attack a year earlier. Peters and her two kids lived upstairs on the   partial second floor that humped up on the backyard end of a camelback   and gave this kind of house its name.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    But if it was a cozy home for an extended New Orleans family, it was also a monument: to the self-reliance of Patrina Peters’s forebears and   to their standing in the city’s Lower Ninth Ward, the rough-and-tumble   working-class community some twenty blocks long and twenty-five blocks   wide just downriver from the Industrial Canal. The waterway cut New   Orleans more or less in half—a corridor of ship repair yards, steel fabricators, cold-storage warehousing, and the like that ran on a   south-to-north axis from the Mississippi River to Lake Pontchartrain.  West of the canal, on the apron of land along the bank of the   Mississippi River, lay the older and generally whiter parts of the   city: Bywater, Marigny, the French Quarter, the downtown area with its   business corridor and gentrified warehouse district, the Garden District, and then, farther up St. Charles Avenue, the sprawling   heterogeneous swath of housing and universities known as Uptown.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    There was more to New Orleans than these original settlements along the   river’s edge. As New Orleans was drained and landfilled early in the   twentieth century, the city pushed out into the swamps, eventually   reaching all the way to the lake, a shallow and brackish inland sea   fifty miles long and twenty-five miles across. More recently, settlement had spread beyond the Lower Ninth into another, considerably   larger welter of swampland and postwar subdivisions known as New   Orleans East. People still spoke of wards in New Orleans, none so   frequently as the Lower Ninth, mainly because it was geographically so   succinct. But these political subdivisions—there were seventeen   wards—for practical purposes had been supplanted in modern times by councilmanic districts, of which there were only five.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Peters knew what people said about the Lower Ninth, and she would hear a lot more of it on television in the weeks ahead. It would sicken and disgust her, the way the TV reporters figured everyone in the Lower   Ninth was poor and on crack and couldn’t get out of the way of a   hurricane if their lives depended on it, which maybe they did.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Peters’s great-grandfather on her mother’s side, the Reverend Allen Thomas, had been pastor of the Battleground Baptist Church when it was   in Fazendeville, a storied African American hamlet on a corner of the   Chalmette National Historical Park a few miles downriver in St. Bernard   Parish. The bulldozing of Fazendeville in 1964 was the final hurrah in   a campaign by preservationists to bring the field to a closer semblance   of its condition during the Battle of New Orleans one hundred fifty   years earlier. Anticipating the end, the pastor moved his flock and his   eleven children and their many children onto land he had acquired in   the Lower Ninth. His sons were builders and cabinetmakers—the reverend   himself sidelined as a roofer—and in due course, a swath of several   blocks was dominated by his family and his followers. Two generations   later, Peters’s cousin the Reverend Eric Lewis, was assistant pastor at   Battleground Baptist. Her uncle the Reverend Freddie McFadden III, a   man who had found God after losing his spleen in a gunfight as a young   man, presided several blocks away at St. Claude Baptist Church.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    And if that didn’t put the lie to the Lower Ninth’s image as a redoubt   of dysfunctional families mired in permanent poverty, Peters didn’t   know what would. Her mother, June Johnson, had managed a school   cafeteria in her day. Her father, Edward Johnson, had retired as   manager of a downtown U-Park lot. Peters herself had earned a degree in clerical studies at Cameron, a commercial college on Canal Street, and   had worked as a cosmetology instructor at a beauty school until 1995. Then for four years, until her health gave out, she held down a job at Xavier University with the big AME janitorial service, a black-owned   business that also cleaned buildings and cut grass for the Orleans   Parish public school system. A plump, cheerful woman who pulled her   hair to the back of her head and held it there with an elastic band,   Peters had a foggy voice much bigger than her diminutive frame. Her   epilepsy was manageable with medication, but a heart condition and a   worsening case of Crohn’s disease, a condition characterized by   recurring intestinal inflammation, knocked her out of the workforce and   onto disability in 1999. She was thirty-seven.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    And so, while her downstairs kin watched TV that last Saturday night in   August, and fretted over news reports of the huge storm winging across   the Gulf, Peters headed upstairs, showered, and got into her nightgown.  There had been a time when Trina, as everyone called her, had spent her   Saturday evenings very differently, most every evening for that matter,   a time when that Nina Simone voice of hers had been part of the smoky   din of local bars and clubs—most especially when a storm was brewing in   the Gulf. Storms were party time. In working-class neighborhoods still   capable of civic occasion other than the late-night huddle along yellow slashes of crime scene tape, folks rolled grills right out to the curb   when a storm was coming, and barbecued ribs and chicken for the whole   block. After all, if the power failed, as it certainly would, uneaten   food would just spoil. Merriment was already unfolding in the streets of the Lower Ninth and elsewhere across New Orleans as Peters took her medications and, by seven pm that Saturday night, was in her bed   asleep.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    She awoke the next morning to family dissension. Her mother had heard   talk of a twenty-foot storm surge and Category 5 winds—winds above 155 miles per hour, the highest ranking on the Saffir-Simpson Hurricane   Scale. That would make Katrina even worse than Betsy, the apocalyptic   1965 tempest that had uprooted trees and stripped roofs of their   shingling all across New Orleans, deeply flooding the Lower Ninth Ward.   June had fled Betsy with Trina, then a child of three, and could see no   reason to do otherwise this time. Trina’s great-uncle James McFadden,   who lived just down the street, had been trapped on a rooftop by Betsy   before extricating himself and joining in the Lower Ninth Ward rescue   effort. “I’m not going to ride this one out,” her mother said. Peters’s   way of dealing with the menace ahead was to stick to routine. All week, she had had it in mind to do a roast for Sunday dinner, with rice and   gravy and peas and potatoes and salad, and she sure enough wasn’t   inclined to give that up for a long drive upriver to an aunt’s place in   St. John Parish.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    But go, go if you need to, she told her mother, and take Damond. Damond   was fourteen, a gangly basketball player already hitting the six-foot mark, but he was Peters’s baby, and when she thought about the roast,   she had her son in mind as much as any of the other people who would   have relished it. Keia, her daughter, would stay behind. They’d eat the   roast together and play a little gin rummy in the late afternoon—a nice   little mother-daughter moment in an apartment refurbished with the new   furniture Peters had bought just two months earlier, a whole   household’s worth. After all, moments like that were harder to come by   and soon might be gone forever, now that Keia was twenty-four and about to graduate from college.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Damond fussed about the plan, and the roast was only part of it. He was   the man of the house. He should stand by his mother and sister. But   Peters would not hear of it. She and Keia would look after themselves.   She would take no chances with Damond. As they loaded up the car, her   uncle James came by to join with the others fleeing upriver. “Why you   want to stay here, Trina?” McFadden asked. She recognized it as a man’s teasing way of begging her to leave, and she answered jauntily, trying   to cool him out: “I’m way upstairs. You go ahead. You go ahead, but we   are way upstairs.” When she saw his eyes starting to get watery, she   tried a different tack. “I trust in God,” she said. “Whatever God   wills, it will be done.” But her confidence was not contagious. Her   uncle got into the car and looked back out at her through the open   window. “I wish you were coming,” he said. His voice was thin, and then he looked away.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    By seven pm that Sunday evening, Peters was again bathed, medicated, and in bed, the last night she would ever spend in her family home, indeed the last time she would ever even want to think of the Lower   Ninth as home.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    It wasn’t the morning news reports that did it. The mayor had made the   evacuation mandatory, but he could do what he wanted. Peters wasn’t planning to leave; she had already passed up her ride. And it wasn’t   the phone call from cousins over on Jourdan Road, four or five blocks   away, to say that they were reconsidering their decision to stay put.   In hindsight, Peters would remember being spooked as much as anything   by a numerological coincidence: that exactly forty years separated 2005   from 1965, Katrina from Betsy. “You know, I think we made a bad   decision,” she said to Keia as the symmetry of the two events dawned on   her. “I have a funny feeling about this.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    And so that Monday morning—near dawn, but way too late—they started   packing clothes, important papers, rounding up Peters’s medications,   her dentures. “I gotta have my teeth!” she joked with her daughter, trying to break the worsening tension that had come over Keia. The   cousins called back, panicky now. From the upper story of their house on Jourdan Road they could see right into the Industrial Canal, beyond   the earthen levee and the concrete flood wall that ran along the top of   it, and what they saw was nerve-racking: “The water is, like, kinda   rising,” they told Patrina, “and it looks like it’s about to come over   the levee.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e     From the endless stories about Betsy, the memories of her uncle and so   many others trapped in raging waters, Peters knew to share that sense of dread. The worst of it was realizing all this was just a prelude to   the cyclone that lay ahead. The rising water would be storm surge   funneling into the canal from the Intracoastal Waterway that connected   to it from the open waters of the Gulf. Amplified by winds and rain,   the surge would test mooring lines and knock barges against the massive   concrete flood walls. But the eye of the hurricane was still miles way.   At 6:10 am, maximum sustained wind speeds had dropped to 121 miles per   hour—Category 3 strength—as Katrina made landfall some fifty miles   southeast of New Orleans, on the withered finger of land that separated   the Mississippi River from the open Gulf. But the eye’s distance hardly   mattered, given the unusual width—four hundred miles—of the whirling   disk that was Katrina.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e     From her upstairs rooms, Peters could see the trees toss mercilessly in   the wind, and she could hear the bits of shingling begin to shred and fly against the walls of the house with a force that she knew would   soon shatter glass. And then, suddenly the house shook with a   concussive thud so violent that it knocked Keia back onto the bed and   sent her mother scrambling to pull everything out of the closet so   there would be room to shut themselves inside. In the months to come,   many theories would be advanced as to exactly what sequence of events,   what chain of natural forces and human failings, led to catastrophe in   New Orleans, but to her dying day Peters, like many of her neighbors,   would remain convinced that the thudding sound, a recurring motif in   her dreams, was the sound of the Industrial Canal being deliberately   dynamited. Why? To spare the fancier, whiter, upriver parts of New Orleans from the devastation that would have gone their way if the   flood walls had ruptured on the other side of the canal. Hadn’t the   city’s business elite done something like that during the catastrophic   flooding of the Mississippi River valley back in 1927—blowing a hole in   the levee and flooding rustic St. Bernard Parish, a realm of trappers and farmers, to ease pressure on the flood defenses at New Orleans? That was fact. History. “Everyone has a right to their opinion,” Peters   would say when confronted with differing views about the explosive   sound she heard as Katrina struck—that it was an electrical transformer   blowing up or, more probably, the impact of a barge as it was swept   over the walls of the ruptured Industrial Canal and thundered like a   giant empty oil drum onto the street below the levee.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Whatever its cause, the sound prompted Peters to peek down the stairs into the kitchen—maybe the stove had blown up—and see, to her horror,   that raging water had torn the wall right off the back of the house,   stripping her of any illusion that her family home, even in the   recesses of its snuggest closets, could provide any protection at all.   Just then the cell phone rang again: Deidra, one of the cousins, jabbering in such terror it was hard to make out the words. They were   on their roof, a half dozen of them, Deidra screamed over the howling   wind. The water had lifted their house right off the pilings and was   carrying it down the street.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Peters called 911 and begged for help. Instead she got a scolding: “You didn’t listen to your mayor? You should have listened to your mayor.”   And with that, the operator hung up. Now she reached her mother on the cell: “Oh, Lord, Mama, we’re gonna drown. We love y’all, but we’re   gonna drown.” With the whole upriver household huddled in a bedroom for the call, Damond had managed to wrench the phone from his grandmother   and was speaking to Keia—his mother’s sobs audible in the background—when the phone went dead. In an instant, it seemed possible,   he had lost both his mother and his sister, women he should have stayed home to protect. Damond began punching numbers into the cell phone, desperate to reach someone, anyone, back in New Orleans who could   attempt a rescue mission to Lamanche Street. No calls went through. He   tried again and again to reach his mother or Keia. Nothing.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    On a hunch that a mattress might float, mother and daughter managed to haul one out through an upstairs window and onto the camelback’s lower   front roof, water now lapping at its eaves. Neighboring houses had been wrenched free of their foundations and were easing out into the street.   When a small cottage floating high in the water knocked up against   their house, they heaved the mattress onto its more gently sloped roof   and clambered aboard. The building swirled in the rising water and slid   in behind the camelback, where it cropped up against a pecan tree, an   old one that had been a fixture in the yard and in Peters’s memories ever since she was a little girl and her mama had sent her out there to   play. “It was like God said ‘This is where I will anchor the house,’ ” she would later remember thinking.Includes new material by the author; [quote]-- Boston Sunday Globe","brand":"Random House Trade Paperbacks","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":46303369429221,"sku":"NP9780812976502","price":22.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/1842\/7735\/files\/9780812976502.jpg?v=1767723031","url":"https:\/\/k12savings.com\/es\/products\/breach-of-faith-isbn-9780812976502","provider":"K12savings","version":"1.0","type":"link"}