Unnatural Disaster

Betsy Reed
September 2006     ISBN: 156025937X

In the months that followed Hurricane Katrina, The Nation published a series of articles and editorials documenting the gross negligence of the Bush administration, the failures of neoliberalism, and the heroic effort of community organizers and ordinary citizens to put New Orleans back together again.

Hurricane Katrina was a natural disaster of staggering proportions. The vicious storm that lashed the Gulf Coast on August 31, 2005, left a scene of utter devastation in its wake.

But the deluge also laid bare an unnatural disaster--a social catastrophe caused by the government's callous indifference to the needs of the region's most vulnerable residents. This pattern of near-criminal government neglect did not begin with Katrina, but the hurricane revealed its extraordinary depth and horrifying consequences, exposing how race and class can spell life or death in contemporary America.

With an introduction by Adolph Reed Jr., Unnatural Disaster features riveting, on-the-scene reporting from Mike Davis and Anthony Fontenot, Naomi Klein, Jeremy Scahill, and Christian Parenti, as well as essays by Patricia J. Williams, Eric Alterman, Alexander Cockburn, Robert Scheer, Earl Ofari Hutchinson, Katrina vanden Heuvel, Eric Foner, Curtis Wilkie, Billy Sothern, Susan Straight, William Greider, Mark Hertsgaard, and many others.

Betsy Reed is the executive editor of The Nation and the editor of the anthology Nothing Sacred: Women Respond to Religious Fundamentalism and Terror.