lovehistory.net

There is something to be said in the discipline of history for simply telling a story, and in that this book has much in common with Hurricane Camille: Monster Storm of the Gulf Coast, published only a year earlier and with the same goal of giving the storm’s survivors a voice in the historical record. Category 5 broadens its sites beyond the survivors to encompass the scientists who played such an important role in determining the path and power of the hurricane, and also in including the stories of local and state government officials whose job it was to respond to the storm. In this way Category 5 gives a more complete picture of the depth and meaning of the devastation. However, it is the narratives of the survivors themselves that take precedence over scanty but tantalizing analysis of survivor’s relationships with the government, and the way race and class define disasters for distinct groups of people. Category 5 would have been a much longer but more academically fulfilling book if it has given these issues the same amount of weight and page length as it did to the harrowing narratives of survival told in the oral histories the authors mined and conducted. This kind of analysis might have added further depth of our understanding of what happened in Hurricane Katrina, which happened the same year Category 5 was published. Also missing is a more piercing look at the role of the federal government in the disaster, another pressing topic when compared with FEMA’s current-day failure to abate the horror in New Orleans. Because of its human interest angle the book is readable and interesting, but as an academic text it fails to adequately scratch below the surface of what happens during disaster to what makes it one in the first place