Jack O'Connor was a police officer at the University of Massachusetts for twenty-one years. After retiring from the police department, he moved to New Orleans and was employed as director of security for a New Orleans hotel chain. He was in the hotel where he was based in downtown New Orleans when Hurricane Katrina struck and devastated the city. O'Connor uses a blend of poetry and prose to describe what he saw, heard, and felt during the great disaster. He not only tells of the damage and horror, but he also shows the goodness of man that this tragedy brought out. He also describes how an event that brought so much pain and suffering to thousands also brought about some very major positive changes in his life. Home They say home is where the heart is. I dont doubt that this is all very true. Do you know what this really means? My home is really in New Orleans. While Katrina ravaged New Orleans And I watched in fascinated wonder, I only saw its power and wild fury As it played out in a very small scene. Over the following days and weeks, When I saw the devastation twas done, Bitter tears flowed down my cheeks As I saw the very soul torn from my home

50 memories, poems, and stories from survivors of the most destructive U.S. hurricane this century. From Florida, through Alabama, Mississippi, and into New Orleans, Louisiana, those who lived through the storm tell of their experiences and memories.

Anyone who was not in New Orleans during Hurricane Katrina and the subsequent flooding of the city experienced the disaster as a media event, a flood of images pouring across television and computer screens. The twenty-four-hour news cycle created a surplus of representation that overwhelmed viewers and complicated understandings of the storm, the flood, and the aftermath. As time passed, documentary and fictional filmmakers took up the challenge of explaining what had happened in New Orleans, reaching beyond news reports to portray the lived experiences of survivors of Katrina. But while these narratives presented alternative understandings and more opportunities for empathy than TV news, Katrina remained a mediated experience. In Flood of Images, Bernie Cook offers the most in-depth, wide-ranging, and carefully argued analysis of the mediation and meanings of Katrina. He engages in innovative, close, and comparative visual readings of news coverage on CNN, Fox News, and NBC; documentaries including Spike Lee's When the Levees Broke and If God Is Willing and Da Creek Don't Rise, Tia Lessin and Carl Deal's Trouble the Water, and Dawn Logsdon and Lolis Elie's Faubourg Treme; and the HBO drama Treme. Cook examines the production practices that shaped Katrina-as-media-event, exploring how those choices structured the possible memories and meanings of Katrina and how the media's memory-making has been contested. In Flood of Images, Cook intervenes in the ongoing process of remembering and understanding Katrina.

The author's poems were constructed during the struggles following the biggest natural/man-made disaster the region has endured in recent history--Hurricane Katrina. One may use the poems to ponder, plan, and produce long-term strategies, in many of the areas discussed, planting seeds in your neighborhoods and throughout the world; also, to develop a positive mission statement to act as a guide for your family and local/national governments in attaining all goals and other endeavors. Your insight will be useful in eradicating the thoughts of the past and in ushering into existence new, positive thoughts to really make this democracy greater than we, the people of the twenty-first century, could ever imagine. It will help to create a civilization that would baffle the minds of past leaders and prophetic spirits, changing the path in which we are now heading, a feat that only God's people are capable to bring to pass through him--the Creator.

50 Memoirs, stories, and poems, first person narratives of their experiences during Katrina

For those interested in learning more about the personal impact of Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath, Narrating the Storm serves as an essential read. This important and timeless volume is a compilation of sixteen narratives that address the experiences of Gulf Coast residents, faculty, and graduate students who were caught up in the largest (not so) natural disaster in United States history. Each contributor deploys storytelling sociology as a methodological approach in order to illustrate how “personal” experiences with disaster are not so personal, but rather reflect and are informed by larger social phenomena related to issues including race, class, gender, age, bureaucracy, risk, collective memory, the blasé, and more. The narratives in this volume exemplify how inequality and injustice are unveiled, exacerbated, and created by the occurrence of disaster; and reveal the sociological in everyday and not-so-everyday experiences.