2006

Come Hell or High Water: Hurricane Katrina and the Color of Disaster, by Michael Eric Dyson (Basic Civitas). Sociologist Dyson, then a professor at the University of Pennsylvania, examines the historical context for, and racial and class politics of, the disaster.

The Great Deluge: Hurricane Katrina, New Orleans, and the Mississippi Gulf Coast, by Douglas Brinkley (Morrow). Incorporating numerous first-person accounts, Brinkley, at the time a history professor at Tulane University in New Orleans, investigates the events of August 27–September 3, 2005.

2007

1 Dead in Attic: After Katrina, by Chris Rose (Simon & Schuster). Rose self-published a collection of his 2005–2006 columns for the Times-Picayune chronicling the hurricane’s aftermath, selling 65K copies, according to the book’s introduction, before being picked up by S&S for publication in 2007.

2008

Two Bobbies: A True Story of Hurricane Katrina, Friendship, and Survival, by Kirby Larson and Mary Nethery, illus. by Jean Cassels (Bloomsbury, ages 4–8), is inspired by the true story, this picture book recounts how a cat and a dog survived the hurricane together.

2009

Zeitoun, by Dave Eggers (McSweeney’s). Eggers’s account of a Syrian-American who was mistaken for a terrorist and arrested while assisting in hurricane rescue efforts has sold almost 273K copies in trade paper to date, according to Nielsen BookScan.

A.D.: New Orleans After the Deluge, by Josh Neufeld (Pantheon). This work of graphic nonfiction by Neufeld, who worked as a Red Cross volunteer in the weeks after Katrina, was serialized as a webcomic in the online magazine Smith in 2009–2010 before being collected in print.

2010

A Place Where Hurricanes Happen, by Renée Watson, illus. by Shadra Strickland (Random, ages 5–9). In her debut picture book, Watson paints a free-verse portrait of a New Orleans neighborhood before and after the hurricane.

Ninth Ward, by Jewell Parker Rhodes (Little, Brown, ages 10–up). Rhodes received a Coretta Scott King Honor for her tale, which has elements of magical realism, of how a 12-year-old orphan survives Katrina.

2011

Salvage the Bones, by Jesmyn Ward (Bloomsbury). Set in a fictional Mississippi Gulf town modeled on Ward’s hometown of De Lisle, Miss., in the days leading up to Hurricane Katrina, this novel received the National Book Award for fiction.

A Storm Called Katrina, by Myron Uhlberg, illus. by Colin Bootman (Peachtree, ages 4–up). A 10-year-old horn player in New Orleans (named after Louis Armstrong) and his family weather the devastating effects of the storm.

2012

Hurricane Katrina: The Mississippi Story by James Patterson Smith (Univ. of Mississippi) draws on numerous oral histories to detail the impact on Mississippi’s Gulf Coast when the 30-ft. storm surge swept across a 75-mile stretch of unprotected towns and cities.

2013

Five Days at Memorial: Life and Death in a Storm-Ravaged Hospital, by Sheri Fink (Crown), is based on Fink’s New York Times Magazine piece “The Deadly Choices at Memorial,” which won a Pulitzer Prize for investigative reporting.

2014

Zane and the Hurricane: A Story of Katrina, by Rodman Philbrick (Scholastic/Blue Sky, ages 10–14). A 12-year-old boy is sent from New Hampshire to visit a relative in the Lower Ninth Ward shortly before the hurricane’s arrival.

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