What Is A Brief Summary Of The Great Deluge By Douglas Brinkley

In the book, The Great Deluge: Hurricane Katrina, New Orleans, and the Mississippi Gulf Coast author Douglas Brinkley takes you on a journey through the political corruption and under calculation of the magnitude of Hurricane Katrina’s effects.

He starts off the essay with his own personal account of the damage that Hurricane Katrina left. From there he moves into stories of other people from Louisiana and their evacuation stories. These stories ranged from animal shelters from multiple days prior, to stories about people who were just planning to wait it out. Then he moves into the main points of the book and how repeatedly the Mayor and Governor fail the people of New Orleans and surrounding areas by not taking the warnings and repeated

There is nothing that could encompass the overall feeling of Hurricane Katrina other than a picture of the broken levees and flooded houses. You could read all of the descriptions in the world about the Hurricane and the flooding and the deaths and the loss of homes, but none of it could perfectly show you how horrific the event truly was as one 2x3 inch image. It was not just flooding that was pictured that made a lasting impact on the audience's views of the devastation, but the people walking through their childhood neighborhoods that had been completely demolished into just piles of rubble. Something else that was striking in the pictures was the amount of people who had died. As the pictures showed people died in vastly different ways. There were examples from drowning in the church, to heart failures, to police violence, to infections in the Superdome. This book really makes you think about how differently the situation would have been handled if the hurricane had landed somewhere else.

Brinkley also clearly states his argument and backs it up with countless facts from a multitude of sources. By doing this Brinkley boosts his argument to make him seem more trustworthy because not only does he just use arguments that support his claim, but he also finds counterarguments and confronts them with facts and statistics to prove their

One of its strengths was for sure the pictures, but also the first hand stories of many people who actually survived the storm thus not just putting the argument from the author's point of view, but from several people's points of view. One of the main weaknesses was repetition of the same concept. It is understandable if you want the audience to grasp a certain part of the story so you repeat it once or twice, but three times or more consecutively the idea just becomes overused and no longer interesting. Another weakness was presenting what seemed to be a truly biased opinion on certain matters. For example his views on Nagin were quite negative and he did not present very much information that supported a possible counterargument on other things that might portray the mayor in more of a positive light. Brinkley definitely achieved his purpose for this book and it was quite an eye opening thing to read