Bay St. Louis, Mississippi, was the former home of CNN correspondent Koch. Here the veteran reporter chronicles how her hometown lost it all and found what mattered.

Hundreds of manuscripts, interviews, and transcripts were collected from students and other residents who were willing to share their personal stories of the disaster. UNO compiled all of the submissions and created The Katrina Archive, which is currently housed at the University of New Orleans library. Voices Rising is a small sampling of this greater collection.

Winner of the 2010 Eudora Welty Book Prize and the Mississippi Library Association’s Nonfiction Author’s Award for 2011 Under Surge, Under Siege shows how Hurricane Katrina tore into Bay St. Louis, Mississippi, raking away lives, buildings, and livelihoods in a place known for its picturesque, coastal views; its laid-back, artsy downtown; and its deep-dyed southern cordiality. The tragedy also revealed the inner workings of a community with an indomitable heart and profound neighborly bonds. Those connections often brought out the best in people under the worst of circumstances. In Under Surge, Under Siege, Ellis Anderson, who rode out the storm in her Bay St. Louis home and sheltered many neighbors afterwards, offers stories of generosity, heroism, and laughter in the midst of terror and desperate uncertainty. Divided into two parts, this book invites readers into the intimate enclave before, during, and after the storm. “Under Surge” focuses on connections between residents, and then it demonstrates how those bonds sustained them through the worst hurricane in US history. “Under Siege” documents the first three years of the grinding aftermath, detailing the unforeseen burdens of stress and depression, insurance scandals, and opportunists that threatened to complete the annihilation of the plucky town. A blend of memoir, personal diary, and firsthand reportage, Under Surge, Under Siege creates a compelling American testament to the strength of the human spirit.

This book presents the fullest account yet written of the impact of Hurricane Katrina on the Mississippi Gulf Coast. Rooted in a wealth of oral histories, it tells the dramatic but underreported story of a people who confronted the unprecedented devastation of sixty-five-thousand homes when the eye wall and powerful northeast quadrant of the hurricane swept a record thirty-foot storm surge across a seventy-five-mile stretch of unprotected Mississippi towns and cities. James Patterson Smith takes us through life and death accounts of storm day, August 29, 2005, and the precarious days of food and water shortages that followed. Along the way the narrative treats us to inspiring episodes of neighborly compassion and creative responses to the greatest natural disaster in American history. The heroes of this saga are the local people and local officials. In often moving accounts, the book addresses the Mississippi Gulf Coast's long struggle to remove a record-setting volume of debris and get on with the rebuilding of homes, schools, jobs, and public infrastructure. Along the way readers are offered insights into the politics of recovery funding and the bureaucratic bungling and hubris that afflicted the storm response and complicated and delayed the work of recovery. Still, there are ample accounts of things done well, and a moving chapter gives us a feel for the psychological, spiritual, and material impact of the eight hundred thousand people from across the nation who gave of themselves as volunteers in the Mississippi recovery effort.

In this historical adventure for middle grade readers, a dog travels through time and rescues a family in New Orleans during Hurricane Katrina. Ranger, the time-traveling golden retriever with search-and-rescue training, arrives in New Orleans as Hurricane Katrina approaches and residents start to evacuate the city. Ranger meets Clare Porter, who is searching for her grandmother. Once Ranger helps Clare find Nana, he takes shelter with them at their home in the Lower Ninth Ward, and they wait for Clare’s father to return from the gas station. But there’s no sign of him as hours pass and the weather gets worse. The wind picks up and rain pours down. And when the levees break, floodwaters dangerously rise, and Clare and Nana are separated. Can Ranger help Clare navigate the flooded streets to safety and back to her family? Praise for the first book in the Ranger in Time series: “This excellent story contains historical details, full-page illustrations, and enough action to keep even reluctant readers engaged.” —School Library Journal “The third-person narration expertly balances Ranger’s thoughts between the appropriately doglike (squirrels! bacon!) and the heroic (Ranger’s drive to find and protect).” —Kirkus Reviews “McMorris’s richly rendered illustrations heighten the plot’s many moments of danger and drama, and Messner incorporates a wealth of historical details into her rousing adventure story.” —Publishers Weekly

Winner of the Bancroft Prize Louisiana Endowment for the Humanities Book of the Year A Publishers Weekly Book of the Year “The main thrust of Horowitz’s account is to make us understand Katrina—the civic calamity, not the storm itself—as a consequence of decades of bad decisions by humans, not an unanticipated caprice of nature.” —Nicholas Lemann, New Yorker Hurricane Katrina made landfall in New Orleans on August 29, 2005, but the decisions that caused the disaster can be traced back nearly a century. After the city weathered a major hurricane in 1915, its Sewerage and Water Board believed that developers could safely build housing near the Mississippi, on lowlands that relied on significant government subsidies to stay dry. When the flawed levee system failed, these were the neighborhoods that were devastated. The flood line tells one important story about Katrina, but it is not the only story that matters. Andy Horowitz investigates the response to the flood, when policymakers made it easier for white New Orleanians to return home than for African Americans. He explores how the profits and liabilities created by Louisiana’s oil industry have been distributed unevenly, prompting dreams of abundance and a catastrophic land loss crisis that continues today. “Masterful...Disasters have the power to reveal who we are, what we value, what we’re willing—and unwilling—to protect.” —New York Review of Books “If you want to read only one book to better understand why people in positions of power in government and industry do so little to address climate change, even with wildfires burning and ice caps melting and extinctions becoming a daily occurrence, this is the one.” —Los Angeles Review of Books

Ten years in the making, Gary Rivlin’s Katrina is “a gem of a book—well-reported, deftly written, tightly focused….a starting point for anyone interested in how The City That Care Forgot develops in its second decade of recovery” (St. Louis Post-Dispatch). On August 29, 2005 Hurricane Katrina made landfall in southeast Louisiana. A decade later, journalist Gary Rivlin traces the storm’s immediate damage, the city of New Orleans’s efforts to rebuild itself, and the storm’s lasting effects not just on the area’s geography and infrastructure—but on the psychic, racial, and social fabric of one of this nation’s great cities. Much of New Orleans still sat under water the first time Gary Rivlin glimpsed the city after Hurricane Katrina as a staff reporter for The New York Times. Four out of every five houses had been flooded. The deluge had drowned almost every power substation and rendered unusable most of the city’s water and sewer system. Six weeks after the storm, the city laid off half its workforce—precisely when so many people were turning to its government for help. Meanwhile, cynics both in and out of the Beltway were questioning the use of taxpayer dollars to rebuild a city that sat mostly below sea level. How could the city possibly come back? “Deeply engrossing, well-written, and packed with revealing stories….Rivlin’s exquisitely detailed narrative captures the anger, fatigue, and ambiguity of life during the recovery, the centrality of race at every step along the way, and the generosity of many from elsewhere in the country” (Kirkus Reviews, starred review). Katrina tells the stories of New Orleanians of all stripes as they confront the aftermath of one of the great tragedies of our age. This is “one of the must-reads of the season” (The New Orleans Advocate).