Hurricane Harvey has cut a path through the South, much like when Hurricane Katrina destroyed the Gulf Coast in 2005. These catastrophic storms leave behind shambles, and some of the books below do justice at describing the horror. Read on in order to grasp the long (and still unfolding) road ahead for those in Texas.
Jesmyn Ward's Salvage the Bones is a big-hearted novel about familial love and community against all odds, and a wrenching look at the lonesome, brutal, and restrictive realities of rural poverty. Winner of the 2011 National Book Award.
In The Great Deluge, bestselling author Douglas Brinkley finds the true heroes of the unparalleled Hurricane Katrina catastrophe, and lets the survivors tell their own stories, masterly allowing them to record the nightmare that was Katrina.
Five Days at Memorial uncovers the harrowing story of a hospital during the Katrina floodwaters where several health professionals faced criminal allegations that they deliberately injected numerous patients with drugs to hasten their deaths.
Kiese Laymon's debut novel Long Division tells about YouTube sensation City Coldson, who moves away from home and is given a book that contains time traveling powers, which enables him to travel back in time and save his family from terrorism by the Ku Klux Klan.
Michael Farris Smith's devastating Rivers is a masterful tale of survival and redemption in a world where the next storm is never far behind.
A decade later, Katrina: After the Storm 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.
America's Great Storm is the memoir from former Mississippi Governor Haley Barbour and details his experience with guiding the poorest state in the nation out of this tragedy.
The Tilted World by Tom Franklin and Beth Ann Fennelly is a fictional account about murder and love during the Mississippi Flood of 1927. An extraordinary tale told with beautiful language from two Oxford writers.
Flight Behavior is a brilliant and suspenseful novel set in present day Appalachia; a breathtaking parable of catastrophe and denial that explores how the complexities we inevitably encounter in life lead us to believe in our particular chosen truths.
Drawdown is a collection of 100 solutions to reverse global warming, based on meticulous research by leading scientists and policymakers around the world.
The Madhouse Effect portrays the intellectual pretzels into which denialists must twist logic to explain away the clear evidence that human activity has changed Earth's climate. Because climate change is fact.
Truth to Power is a book companion to Al Gore's documentary An Inconvenient Truth.
The Sixth Extinction blends intellectual and natural history and field reporting into a powerful account of the mass extinction unfolding before our eyes. Winner of the Pulitzer Prize.
Please Forward is a collection of blog posts from a blogging community that was vital for rebuilding New Orleans.