What the City needs | 1 Dead in Attic: After Katrina

Service | 1 Dead in Attic: After Katrina | Chris Rose

books:


	• 1 Dead in Attic: After Katrina Chris Rose Simon & Schuster, 2007 - 384 pages average customer review:based on 27 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

1 Dead in Attic: After Katrina

Excellent read. Varying quality columns but mainly high. Gave a very personal perspective to the aftermath of a tragic event which made it more comprehensible. Helped make understandable why it is taking the victims so long to recover. Never self absorbed or high blown in rhetoric.

What the City needs

Chris Rose, a local newspaper reporter immersed in the aftermath of Katrina, provides insight into the lives of those who stayed behind to rebuild their homes, businesses and lives. His cynicism and depression while searching for daily signs of progress (and happily reporting when they occur) appear to be common responses to the frustrations encountered by those whose wanted nothing more than a return to normalcy. But what is normal for New Orleans? He tries to find common ground for the many diverse cultures there, to revive the demoralized spirit of the city. He seems to be saying the worst of the devastation left behind wounds that can only be healed from within. While money and helping hands are crucial and appreciated to the rebuilding process, the pulse of New Orleans, the big draw, can only be fully restored by resurrecting and lifting the soul of the city, its colorful inhabitants.

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Service

I served in New Orleans leading a group of 8 18-24 year olds with AmeriCorps National Civilian Community Corps. This is by far the best chronicle I've encountered yet. It is the most honest and true to form retelling of what was going on that the rest of America never knew. Beautifully done.

"Let us not look back in anger or forward in fear, but around in awareness." James Thurber

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Post Katrina Blues

This is the best book about New Orleans, pre- or post Storm. (Be sure to purchase the After Katrina version.) Chris Rose captures the spirit and uniqueness of the people of New Orleans without playing the blame game or politicizing. The stories are sometimes heart-wrenching and sometimes humorous; they will make you cry with laughter and cry with tenderness. If there is serendipity out of Katrina, this is it.

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A Man and His City

The most personal book I've read about Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath in New Orleans is this collection of newspaper columns from New Orleans Times Picayune writer Chris Rose. Proving that living somewhere involves more than occupying a house there, Rose seemingly suffers the trauma of all New Orleanians, even though his own house and family endure essentially no damage from the storm (other than a four-month relocation of wife and children to Maryland). The title refers to words painted on the side of a house as a message to recovery crews. More than a year after the storm, the words are still on that house.

Along with chronicling Rose's personal journey, the book serves a second purpose of telling the stories of dozens of other New Orleanians and "The Thing", as Rose calls Katrina. Among my favorites is the guy who collects magnets off the thousands of abandoned rerfigerators to cover his truck. Rose waxes poetic and fantastic along the way. You'll love "Refrigerator City" and maybe even his rants about Mayor Ray Nagin's "Chocolate City" comment (the column about breakfast with God and Martin Luther King, Jr. is one of a kind.)

This second edition is a combination of the popular shorter first edition and a second book initially intended to be published separately as "Purple Upside Down Car" (a phrase taken from Rose's young son noticing one of the many destroyed cars around the city).

My only complaint with the book is with its somewhat haphazard organization. The book is organized into several subsections and is for the most part chronological, but often not. Still, the columns within each subsection don't necessarily fit together that well. It's a minor complaint, since each column is so interesting that the reader is pulled along from one to the next. The book ends with Rose's year-end column from 2006, more than a year after the storm.

Four-and-a-half stars (rounded up to five for intensity and revelation) for the personal story of a storm's impact on a man and his city.

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reviews: 1, 2, page 3, 4, 5, 6

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