cover image Markets of Sorrow, Labors of Faith: New Orleans in the Wake of Katrina

Markets of Sorrow, Labors of Faith: New Orleans in the Wake of Katrina

Vincanne Adams. Duke Univ., $22.95 trade paper (232p) ISBN 978-0-8223-5449-9

While Hurricane Katrina ravaged New Orleans and many surrounding areas, an even larger disaster occurred when survivors returned and tried to rebuild their lives. In this sometimes plodding and jargon-filled but still compelling ethnographic account of the recovery process, medical anthropologist Adams recounts the stories of numerous survivors who are rebuilding in an “economy of recovery [that] both responded to and drew on suffering in order to reproduce itself....” Katrina’s aftermath is at once a story of triumph in the midst of disaster, but it also continues to be a story dominated by the tale of private-sector corporations and the federal government acting irresponsibly and creating “vulnerable people who were then made more vulnerable by the recovery machinery deployed to help them... [creating] markets of sorrow in which the production of profits, like the production of indebtedness among the already poor, are integral to the survival of the market itself.” (Mar.)