The Thin Red Line

With a big thanks to Nina Munteanu, whose blog post last week brought it to my attention, I want to talk about a new Blogger widget that allows visitors to your blog to purchase your entire archived posts as a bound book. Please note that for reasons I will make clear the button below is only an image and has no active link.

From the information in Nina’s post and other information gathered at the web site, I first learned that the retail price for the book is $19.95 soft cover/ $24.95 hardcover of which the blog owner receives a flat 20% royalty on all sales, regardless of volume. In mainstream book retailing, $20 would be High for a trade paperback, and at that price point readers would expect a pretty substantial volume to feel they have gotten their money’s worth. While it is not exactly buried in fine print, the much less publicized fact is that the theoretical book used in the example is only 20 pages in length, and each 2 additional pages add an additional $ 1 to the retail price. (Please note that I do not say the cover price; in my testing no price appeared anywhere on the book’s cover or pages.) There is a limit of 200 total pages per book. If my math is correct ($19.95 + ((180/2)*$1)= $109.95 retail for a 200 page trade paperback book. Speaking as someone with long experience in selling books, I state categorically that this is not a viable price point for any customer other than those traditionally served by vanity presses.

Self publishing an identical book with the publishing service Lulu.com would cost a base $34.53 per unit, plus whatever the author chooses to have added to that base price as their payment. For the sake of argument, add in the $21.99 that the blog owner would theoretically receive on sales (I can’t imagine there would be many) of the $109.95 book and you have a retail of $56.52. This is still more than any reader who does not personally know the author would ever pay for a book. With Lulu, you would have the option of getting that price down, however, first by selecting black and white printing rather than full color Base cost $8.53, then add a flat $5.46 author payment, which in traditional publishing would be a phenomenal net payment for an unknown author of a title with limited distribution potential, and you have a $13.95 cover priced paperback which you can realistically hope to sell to most anyone who can be made interested in what you write.

Additionally, I am very sorry to report that the SharedBook software is not ready for prime time. In my testing, which I repeated twice, my oldest blog posting was dated May 30th and my newest September 21st. I selected the option to publish All rather than specify a date range. This was the only user-available option prior to automatically generating my book. After a long but not unreasonable wait, the site prompted me to download the images of my book covers and pages in an 8MB .pdf file. First, and perhaps most seriously Blog2Print for unknown arbitrary reasons included only posts from July 21st to September 21st in my 40 page ($29.95 retail includes a $5.99 author payment) book. Despite repeating the generation and download steps and insuring that Publish All was selected, I was never able to get Blog2Print to include my May and June posts. An even greater concern is that Blog2Print, apparently choosing at random from images within my blog posts that were of an appropriate scale and shape, printed the front cover of Poppy Z. Brite’s D*U*C*K on the front cover of my book and the front cover of John F. Hunt’s Stuff Guys Need To know on my back cover.

This is extremely unacceptable, not only to my own tastes and sensibilities (I pan both of these books between those covers), but more importantly because it is a clear cut infringement of the copyright rights of Ms. Brite, Mr. Hunt and their respective publishers which could expose both me and Blog2Print to liability were I to actually have this thing printed and distributed as they have prepared it.

Having discussed Lulu as an alternative, I need to make clear some important differences between self-publishing with Lulu and auto-publishing through the Blog2Print widget. With Lulu, the author is responsible for manually preparing the .pdf files from which the book is professionally printed, and this is not a trivial undertaking. However, given that the data to be published is already in precisely formatted HTML, the task is not beyond the reasonably assumed technical reach of a blogger who has progressed to the point of having 200 pages of posts worth preserving in a book. Another important difference is that to publish through Lulu you will have to pay a $100 fee to Lulu that covers things such as getting your book assigned an ISBN and getting the book and it’s ISBN loaded into the standard industry distribution channels that will make it available from wholesalers and retailers such as Amazon.com. You will also be required to buy a copy (at the base price) after you have made all final changes and before the book is irrevocably "set" to insure that the finished product is as you expect while it is still possible to make further corrections and changes should they be needed. (Think of this as a "proof" copy as it is called in traditional publishing.)

It is entirely realistic to believe that you have or will accumulate a sufficient number of sufficiently high quality blog posts to publish a book, and there are realistic means of doing so. Unfortunately, at this time, Blog2Print is NOT one of them.

I have never been a fan of the "dummies" books and honestly never understood how a publisher that unequivocally calls its audience Stoopid on the cover of every book could possibly become popular, yet the bright yellow tomes on a huge range of topics have become ubiquitous. And sometimes, though certainly not always, the books themselves are quite good.

Blogging For Dummies is a comprehensive reference that begins by defining the term blog and proceeds methodically to tell you most everything you need to know about them. Brad Hill takes a very humorous and self-deprecating tone which somewhat makes up for the very hand-holding, step-by-step ’software manual’ style these books inevitably adopt.

I particularly enjoyed the discussion of the various options for starting a blog: from the social networks on MSN Spaces and Yahoo 360 and Google’s less sociable and slightly geekier Blogger (all free) to paid Type Pad accounts, to using Movable Type or Word Press pre-installed on a blogging specialist web host’s server to downloading and installing one of these programs on your own on a general web hosting server. I started this blog on a whim, without ever considering what options were available and am quite pleased to realize that had I reviewed all of these options before starting I very likely still would have chosen Blogger.

Other sections cover the mechanics of day to day blogging, the use of RSS and other syndication services, publicizing and promoting your blog, netiquette for bloggers and, finally monetizing your blog with ads. This volume would be most useful for someone who has already begun blogging and wants to get a better understanding of what it’s all about and helpful to prospective bloggers who prefer to learn before they leap. Recommended.

Publishing a Blog with Blogger is a highly visual, well-written and concise guide to doing exactly what the title says. Elizabeth Castro does not spare a word or a pixel for the history of blogging, the possibilities of using other hosts and software platforms or anything else except showing you precisely, step-by-step how to build and manage a Blogger blog. This book would be excellent for helping someone like my mother, who has never blogged before, to make their first effort. (My mom has started reading here lately and I hope she will see this suggestion– she has become a great photographer in recent years and I would love to be able to visit her blog and see her latest pictures every day!) Highly Recommended.

The Best of Blogs seems uncertain what it wants to be– a guide for new bloggers, a history of the medium or a directory listing of interesting and unusual blogs. And in its indecision, it fails in all three areas. The history and general explanations, occupying a small section at the beginning of the book are cursory and provide little useful information. The meat of the book, occupying the middle two thirds of the 320 pages consists of a listing of blogs in various categories, which do not seem particularly well chosen. The authors seem to be most interested in parenting and child oriented blogs as well as football and sports centered blogs. If these are not your particular interests this section will not be all that helpful. (I also believe that printed directories of online content are necessarily obsolete 60 seconds after they come off the press and a waste of paper under the best of circumstances, even when the listings are well-chosen, which these are not.) The final section of the book, about 50 pages addresses the particulars of creating your own blog. This section feels like an after-thought and would have very limited utility for a new blogger. NOT Recommended.

All three of these books and many other books about blogging can be found in your public library at Dewey Decimal Number 006.7.

No, work wasn’t that bad, though it was a long week and I am glad to be to my Tuesday/Wednesday "weekend". I am continuing to upload and sort through Joel’s old image files and found the above amongst many, many, many other things. Thought it was cute enough to pass along.

(more…)

And then it went fast.

Yesterday afternoon a not particularly humpy UPS guy (Ron quipped ‘I thought that was illegal’) dropped off a box from Earthlink. David came over after work and he and Ron fiddled with things a bit and today we have broadband again, wireless networked to two computers. We are thrilled with the speed. David was very pleased he got it to work after not being able to get the laptop online on Linux a couple of weeks back. (The latest on that is that we will try re-installing XP and see if we can’t get the lappy onto our wireless as well.)

I previously read and blogged about Jed Horne’s Katrina Book Breach Of Faith and recently happened upon this 2005 title detailing the story of Curtis Kyls who was arrested for the 1984 murder of Dolores Dye in a supermarket parking lot. The cover blurbs compare it to In Cold Blood and Midnight In The Garden Of Good And Evil, and it does read like a novel, a real page turner. Kyls, who insisted all along that he had nothing whatever to do with Dye’s murder, spent 14 years incarcerated at Orleans Parish Prison and the Angola Penitentiary as his case wound through 5 trials, 4 hung juries, one conviction and an appeal that went all the way to the US Supreme Court, making it one of the most litigated murder cases in history. He was ultimately released in 1998 when Orleans district attorney Harry Connick declined to begin work on a sixth trial.

Regardless of whether you believe Kyls did or did not kill Dye, the case represents a serious mis-carriage of justice, which Horne amply demonstrates was emblematic of the troubled criminal justice system in Louisiana in the 80’s and 90’s. (Horne himself flatly states that he does not know whether or not Kyls is guilty of the crime and leaves it for the reader to determine.) I remember when I read and blogged about Bayou Farewell, remarking how despite having grown up in New Orleans just 75 miles or so away the Cajun coast was a world I had known very little of and with this book I was again struck by what a different and foreign world the people in this book inhabited, just a very few miles from where I grew up. Recommended.

Ron teased me that the only reason I picked up The Naked Soldier was in hopes there would be pictures of naked soldiers inside, which is as good a theory as any. (Honestly I don’t know why I decided to read it.) Tony Sloane was a lower class 18 year old from rural England who decided on a whim to join the French Foreign Legion. This book is a memoir of his 5 years of service in that famous army. To be honest, I found his story appalling. The early chapters relate the intense abuse that new recruits to the Legion are systematically subjected to, while the later chapters relate how the recruits become “cold blooded killers” who routinely subject not only new recruits but also the general population of various African countries to unimaginably horrific treatment. Unless you are interested in reading about lawless, reckless and unspeakably cruel young men, this one is NOT recommended.

I was shelving in the 910’s this afternoon and came across a post-Katrina travel guide for New Orleans (first one I’ve seen) and picked up. I was mostly interested in finding out what things are still there and still recommended. It was somewhat disappointing in that as of the November 2006 publication date so much was still up in the air. I was very pleased to learn that The Fairmont Hotel (the subject of Arthur Hailey’s novel Hotel, site of my high school senior luncheon and where Joel and I stayed on a visit some years back) is being repaired and will re-open. (Previously Ron and I had heard that there were no plans to re-open so this was good news.) They also say that The Camelia Grill is expected to re-open, though as of the press date it had not.

Reading about New Orleans, the restaurants and the food put in the mood to make jambalaya for dinner. I have chopped onions and celery, sliced smoked sausage, peeled a pound of frozen shrimp and boiled the shrimp shells to make a broth. Now I just have to put it together. This is not exactly on my diet, but I have been pretty good about South Beaching it for the past week or so and my blood sugar has been in the low 100’s every morning so I feel entitled to indulge. Bon Appetit!

Sunday was as expected a busy, hectic day. We are getting huge volumes of returns and have a lot of material backed up to be shelved. To make sure it was a completely sucky day, my hearing aid died at the beginning of the shift. The switch is broken and it will not turn on or off and regardless of the non-setting it constantly makes a deep pitched banging noise, which is usually the signal for a dying battery. Have to disconnect the battery to get it to be quiet. It always un-nerves me when I have to be out in public when my ear is out and I can’t hear at all.

And to top it all off, my toothache, which had been on hiatus is back tonight with a vengence, and I am out of the Vicodin my dentist gave me a couple of weeks ago. So for the first time ever on this job, I am calling in sick today and going to try to get my hearing aids fixed. Tomorrow I have a dentist appointment and will hopefully get more pain meds and by Thursday will feel up to going back to work. Feh.

I finished reading Poppy Z. Brite’s Soul Kitchen. I was under-whelmed. Unlike in D*U*C*K, where she rhapsodized about the food a lot, there is little specific mention of the restaurant’s food as the protagonists are busy buying a rustic fishing camp in Shell Beach and consulting on a restaurant that is to be opened in a floating casino. Neither of these ideas much interested me, and I frequently found myself discovering that the characters are not at all as I had perceived them in the later book. (Notably I had gotten the distinct impression in D*U*C*K that Ricky and G-Man were black but in this book it is made clear they are white– that the characterizations in the later book were so poorly drawn that I could be left with such a big mis-perception is unfortunate.) I suppose sooner or later the two earlier books in this sequence will happen my way and I will probably read them, but I can’t say I enjoyed or recommend this book or this author.

I am also about half way through reading A Perfect Mess and am thoroughly enjoying it. Also about a third of the way through A Boy’s Life. Today’s illustration is of a metal advertising sign (Joel used to have a huge collection of these, including this one, which I sold off before I moved down here.) for a product which unfortunately I do not have, but it seemed topical

whew. was very busy for a Sunday today. my manager thinks it is getting progressively busier every Sunday and thinks it will get even busier once school starts back up and I fear she is right. so much for the easy day. i do like the work but my arthritis hurt by 3:30 and I was glad to be off at 5:15. had to go to downtown Tacoma to run an errand after work and glad to finally be home and relaxing.

Today’s most interesting find was Soul Kitchen by Poppy Z. Brite. This novel comes directly before D*U*C*K*. I had not thought about looking for the previous books in the series but decided to give this a whirl, reading the series backwards.

I am also re-reading Boy’s Life and enjoying it immensely. We have a feature at PCLS called Books Plus To Go where we offer multiple copies of newly released trade paperback versions of last seasons best sellers in a big rack at the front. It’s a great place to grab something quick to read on a 30 minute lunch break. Which is how I happened to grab a copy last week of Greg Palast’s Armed Madhouse. I remember him as a relatively sober reporter and one of the only ones who reportedly honestly about election 2000. he is still reporting honestly but in this book is also laugh out loud funny with true life tales of shenanigans in bushville.

I don’t know why I picked up a manual on Writing Mysteries, but I did about a month ago and read a little of it. It’s been sitting on the sofa since and my end up going back unread but for the moment is still Here. At the same time I checked out the above, I also got Daddy’s Gone A-Hunting, a mystery set in 1930’s New Orleans. It sounds promising but has yet to grab me and it too is Still Here. Of somewhat more recent vintage is The Naked Brain in which a neurologist discusses "how the latest imaging techniques have changed our knowledge of how we think, feel, remember, socialize and learn in unprecedented and often surprising ways," according to the cover blurb. It would seem to have a better shot at completion.

So that’s what I’m reading now, though at the moment I can focus on nothing heavier than The Simpsons and plan to get to bed early. Happy Sunday

So Thursday I got a message from Bev, who very kindly offered to lend me her copy. (Thank You, Bev!) Then when I got home from work on Friday Ron handed me my very own brand new copy of Deathly Hallows and my wait was at end. (I was up to 64th on the waiting list when I canceled my request on Sunday.) I started reading right away, stopped briefly when we had a visitor, then read all night. I finished Chapter 36 in the car Saturday morning the instant before I went in to work, then read the epilogue on my break around 11am. I have since re-read it most of the way through a second time.

I have nothing but good to say about Harry Potter. It has been such a pleasure these past six years to watch these kids grow up, and as I began reading I found myself thinking that Ms. Rowling has likewise really grown as a writer over the course of these seven books. I thought that the wedding scene early in the novel (where the evil old society biddy gossips savagely to horrified listeners too polite to stop her) was worthy of Jane Austen. (Ron gave me a very dirty look when I said that.)

I did not find that any of the spoiler information detracted from the experience in the least. When it was finished the outcome felt very much inevitable and could not have been otherwise. I found the story very emotionally gripping and admit that I cried at several points. And when it was over felt an enormous catharsis. Bravo. And now that I have recovered from HP fever, I hope to get back to reading other things and blogging about them regularly.

We had three people out sick today and it was an especially busy and hectic Monday at the library. I worked my ass off and will be happy to be off tomorrow and Wednesday. I have a dentist appointment tomorrow afternoon and got a confirmation from Group Health of my doctor assignment and will be able to make a doctor appointment tomorrow. Even when it’s a rough day, I love this job and am so thrilled to have insurance and benefits again.

Years ago when I was living in Boston, I was in a book store with my friend Billie and she handed me a copy of Boy’s Life and strongly encouraged me to buy it. I did and I loved it. It’s a coming of age tale set in rural Alabama. It is beautifully written and a wonderful read. I’ve no idea whatever became of that copy I bought all those years ago in Boston, but while shelving in fiction this afternoon I came across this book and knew I would have to check it out and re-read it. So I brought it home and added it to the stack and look forward to returning soon to Zephyr, Alabama and the life of young Cory Mackenson. And find myself wondering tonight how Billie is doing these days and if anyone has heard from her lately.

Ron predicted that UW would examine Staci and send her right back home to Kathi’s and so they did. He talked to them on the phone. Clint got in okay and they will be here until Wednesday. We are planning to get together with them Tuesday, my next day off.

Work was the usual easy Sunday. I was amazed that most of the Harry Potters remained unclaimed on their cart in the back room. (I have also suffered from the temptation to go ahead and buy a copy, but new books are not in our budget so I have so far resisted, though who knows how long my resolve will last…)

I had not previously heard of Poppy Z. Brite, who apparently has written seven other novels, but I came across D*U*C*K the other day and was sufficiently intrigued to bring it home and read it. It is a very short novel (132 pages) about a gay black couple in New Orleans who are chefs and run a restaurant called Liquor, where they use booze in all the recipes. The plot centers around their experiences catering a banquet in Opelousas for an organization of duck hunters who are working to preserve the wetlands. Brite (who appears to be a petite white woman reminiscent of a porcelain doll in her jacket photo) writes with authority about New Orleans and restaurant kitchens, although at times her gay, black, male protagonists fail to ring true. I thoroughly enjoyed the book, which is in some ways an erotic love poem to New Orleans and its food. But given the extreme brevity and the $35 cover price (?!?!???!!!) I can’t recommend anyone go out and buy it.

Also, although this book is available from Pierce County Library, it is for some reason not listed in Worldcat, so there is no link to the book cover.

Roux The Day is one of a series of seven Gourmet Detective mysteries by Peter King. The "Gourmet Detective" is a London-based foodie who works for chefs finding rare ingredients, recipes and substitutions. While on another case in Los Angeles he receives a telephone from a New Orleans attorney and agrees to stop over in The Big Easy on his way home to assist in authenticating and purchasing a "chef’s book"– a book of recipes and menu information for a particular restaurant which is up for auction in a local charity event.

The GD arrives at the auction to find that the book has already been sold, he is told to a New Orleans bookshop owner. The GD proceeds to the bookshop in hopes of getting the book, only to find a recently deceased man at the shop owner’s desk. The lawyer who hired him indicates that obtaining the book is paramount and offers a huge bonus if the book can be produced and authenticated. The GD is then "kidnapped" by a group of women chefs who call themselves "The Wiches" (for Women In Culinary & Hotel Employment).

As promising as the premise was, and much as I enjoy reading about New Orleans and the food there, I found this book difficult to get into. Though it is less than 250 pages it took me over a month of fits and starts. While the author seems to have an encyclopedic knowledge of gastronomy, New Orleans seems to be just another backdrop for the protagonist to be presented against. And while there was much local trivia incorporated into the text, it failed to credibly draw up the city for me. I doubt I will try any of the other GD mysteries. (I also find it annoying that the gentleman’s name is never mentioned, forcing me to use the silly "Gourmet Detective" title over and over.

It was a long, tiring busy day at work, par for a Monday but none of the hundreds of books I handled caught my eye as much as the new issue of  The Advocate  that was in today’s mail when I got home.

I vaguely remember reading, not too long before I left New Orleans in the mid–late eighties of the arrival of Andrei Codrescu, though I don’t recall hearing anything of him since and had not previously read anything he wrote. So there were the dual pleasures of discovering Codrescu and seeing Codrescu discover N’awlins. The included essays were written over a 20 year period or so and thus cover the author’s becoming a New Orleanian. Most of the pieces are of a very short form written as weekly newspaper column and even the longer pieces are still fairly short and for the volume of it, you’d think this would be a quick read, but it isn’t. I found many of the stories required savoring and digesting and in the end they proved just too rich and filling to have more than two or three at a sitting. Recommended.

Ron and I have very different tastes in books and bring home very different stacks of books. But sometimes I read some of his or vice versa. Here’s three of his choices that I read or skimmed but didn’t put on my list.

I checked this one in at work and knew immediately I had to bring it home for Ron. As a big fan of The South Beach Diet, I found this over the top parody almost frightening. It promises to help you gain "two full dress sizes in eight days", laying out a program of four mega ginormous meals per day and including recipes like Batter Fried Twinkies . But it is laugh out loud funny at times and I knew the book’s willful sloth and in-your-face tone would appeal to Ron. It did.

A kind of cross between Steel Magnolias and Judith Martin in a place where Paula Deen meets Martha Stewart. Somebody is going to die… is an hilarious treatment of Southern weddings from the perspective of the ladies of a certain Mississippi Delta town. Their spot on observations and hilarious anecdotes present Southern weddings from shot-gun to over-the-top in all their glory. And the included recipes for everything from wedding cake and punch to cheese straws and chicken salad cream puffs, while not quite as scary as the North Beach stuff, contain more than enough butter and cream to frighten Dr. Agaston and please Ms. Deen.

I am only a few chapters into this one and probably will not finish it. Lotsa chatter with lots currently fashionable terminology. Much talk about a new collaborative economy and web 2.0 changing the world and Generation N and yada yada yada. Ron says parts of it are very interesting, so maybe it will pick up and I will finish, but I am doubtful.

Hoping to hear tomorrow about the job I interviewed for last week and have another interview scheduled Tuesday, and working four days this week. And looking forward to day off on payday, Thursday.

Another Katrina book today. Like The Great Deluge, Breach of Faith documents Katrina’s assault on New Orleans through the stories of dozens of people who lived through it. While Deluge strictly limited itself to the week or so surrounding the storm, Breach covers approximately 6 months after the event. Where Deluge focused a lot on FEMA and gave a somewhat sympathetic view of Michael Brown, Breach focused more on the post storm political maneuvering and utterly savages "Brownie".

As a native of New Orleans I probably have an unusually high degree of interest in reading about Katrina and its aftermath and thoroughly enjoyed this book. But honestly I can’t imagine that most people who have read one of the other Katrina books would have the patience for another 400 page rendering of the story. That said, Breach is very well written and does not seem to have drawn the sorts of criticism that Deluge did. If you still have the stomach for reading more on Katrina, this one comes highly recommended.

Working a full day down in Eatonville again today and tired cuz an almost full can of diet Pepsi got knocked over into the bed and flooded us out just as I was getting to sleep. Feh. The summer that I was 19 I spent my days sitting behind a card table in a tiny stall at the French Market in New Orleans, reading tarot cards for tourists and passers by. After paying the stall rent I ended up making even less money than I would have in retail, but it was fun. And it was amazing to me what intimate things people (mostly women) would tell me. I always began by having the seeker look through the cards and pick out one to represent her and it never failed that while doing so she would tell me more than enough about herself for me to be able to do a good reading. Yesterday I stumbled across a site that automates this process, having you complete a short questionnaire then picking a card for you. I’m none to sure about its accuracy, since it picked for me a much more powerful card than the one I have always used, but still I thought it was fun enough to pass along.

You are The Magician

Skill, wisdom, adaptation. Craft, cunning, depending on dignity.

Eleoquent and charismatic both verbally and in writing,
you are clever, witty, inventive and persuasive.

The Magician is the male power of creation, creation by willpower and desire. In that ancient sense, it is the ability to make things so just by speaking them aloud. Reflecting this is the fact that the Magician is represented by Mercury. He represents the gift of tongues, a smooth talker, a salesman. Also clever with the slight of hand and a medicine man - either a real doctor or someone trying to sell you snake oil.

What Tarot Card are You?
Take the Test to Find Out.

Today I want to talk about a couple of Katrina books I’ve read recently. DISASTER Hurricane Katrina and the Failure of Homeland Security provided a very different perspective and proved very enlightening. The book begins with a discussion of “Hurricane Pam” a training exercise first developed in May 1995 and largely ignored until July 2004 when a large contingent of local, state and federal disaster officials participated in a week-long dry run, discussing in detail the actions they would take if a category 5 hurricane hit New Orleans dead-on. While widely regarded as helpful, the exercise demonstrated a number of serious short-comings, all of which the FEMA participants assured the locals the feds would be prepared to address.

The book goes on to give a somewhat detailed explanation of New Orleans’ unique geography and vulnerability and a history of the city’s complex and highly political flood protection systems. So far, standard fare. But then it gets interesting, moving on to present a history of FEMA and telling me some things I didn’t know.

Created from an alphabet soup of other agencies FEMA has had a mission dealing with both natural disasters and what has come to be called terrorism. In the Reagan years, the natural disasters side of FEMA very much took a back seat to an operation that spent incredible sums of money preparing for extraordinarily unlikely scenarios on the order of keeping the US government operating in the event of a planet-wide nuclear holocaust. (visions of Uncle Ronnie Ray Gun stumping for Star Wars) The doomsday focus continued through the first Bush administration and then Hurricane Andrew hit Florida in 1992, FEMA proved useless, many Floridians suffered horribly and in turn voted out Pappy Bush.

The Clinton years brought about great change. Bill appointed a guy from Arkansas with no formal education at all, who nonetheless was quite skilled at emergency management. He canned the doomsday spook operations, focused on providing post-disaster service as well as working with local governments on advance planning to reduce and mitigate the effects of disasters, and was widely praised on both sides of the aisle.

Then along came Junior and 9/11. Anything related to the “war on terror” was a slam dunk for beaucoup funding, the “black ops” section of FEMA was back with a vengeance and disaster prevention, planning and service again took a low funded back seat. The Reagan Years redux. Katrina, the authors argue was not “the perfect storm”, but only an ordinary hurricane that became such a monumental catastrophe only due to the Bushie’s years of short changing both FEMA and the Corps of Engineers responsible for maintaining the system of levees and flood walls.

The book then details the widely reported incompetence shown by the feds in the days and weeks following the storm. While this section provided little that I had not already heard many times in the reporting as it happened, it gave a unique perspective of some of the officials who seemed to display such stunning ineptitude. While by no means giving Michael Brown a pass, it made a good case that the FEMA director was more scape-goat than villain. I would definitely consider this book worth reading if you’ve an interest in understanding better how the so-called “war on terror” has decimated the government’s ability to handle its most basic responsibilities to provide for the common welfare.

Another excellent Katrina book I’ve read recently is The Great Deluge, which follows the stories of several dozen people in the New Orleans area in the days immediately before and after Katrina. This book gives the best sense I have yet gotten of what it was really like to be in New Orleans during that horrible week, which was quite different than the impressions I got watching it happen on tv. In contrast to the title above, this book is completely limited to a time frame of about a week and discusses only the events until the evacuation was completed the Saturday morning following the storm. I was particularly taken with the story of the doctors at Baptist Hospital (It’s actually called something else now but I forget what and will always know it as Baptist.) A doctor and several nurses were later charged with homicide when dead patients were found to have been injected with morphine and other strong drugs. (That these people were seriously ill to begin with and were left in a sweltering, un-air conditioned hospital for nearly a week and may well have been given drugs for anxiety and pain because they were suffering severe anxiety and pain seemed to escape the prosecutor.) There has been some criticism of the author’s methods and some questioning of the accuracy of some of the reporting, but it seemed credible to me and was a good read.

And for any who are worried that this blog is going to be all New Orleans or all about Katrina, be assured I have a wide and eclectic range of reading interests and expect to write about all kinds of books here.

Until next time, keep turning those pages and support your local public library.