Kaethe

Just this past week I read a critique of the reporting on Katrina in general, and on [book:Five Days at Memorial: Life and Death in a Storm-Ravaged Hospital|17704902] in particular, as being written by outsiders who don't know enough to know what they were missing. Since I can't find the piece now, I realize that mentioning it isn't very helpful. But here's the detail that struck me: Memorial Hospital's name had been changed years before the storm, but in the way of these things, the name change had not been complete: signs, maps, and the local's common name for the hospital did not match up. Since my marriage I have become familiar with people giving directions in terms of things which do not currently exist and may not have existed for some time (there has not been a Kroger in "Kroger Plaza" for at least 25 years). Medical facilities in the area have consolidated and re-divided, clinics upgraded to special hospitals, outpatient services taken out of hospitals and put into clinics, bits and pieces named after individuals, and couples, distinctions made between teaching bits and non-teaching bits, and cetra, and cetra. You'd be hard-pressed to find two people who could agree on what any specific location or entity should be properly called <i>within the entities</i>. Local folks ignore all that, relying on a word or two <i>in context</i>. So yes, I can imagine that in a devastating event miscommunication as to what the hell hospital it is we're trying to evacuate would be likely.

So, I wanted to read this book to listen to the voices of the people of New Orleans, at least some of them. Baum is doing a good job of evoking them. I'm enjoying this in the same way I enjoyed [book:Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil: A Savannah Story|386187].

***

It's a book both horrifying and wryly amusing. Baum does a great job of bringing his nine different people to vivid life and making you care deeply about their interests and their actions. And the book fills me with a blinding rage that racism killed so many people, and that Bush was so blithely indifferent to the lives of thousands. This is why Black Lives Matter: because clearly, to many Americans, they don't, not even a tiny bit. I'm still angry about reporters and photo captions that accused Black people of looting, but white people of "finding food." It's got to stop.

personal copy