Hurricane Katrina

Re "Why FEMA Was Missing in Action," Sept. 5 If the American public accepts the administration's shifting of blame for the failure to respond to Katrina from Homeland Security and the Federal Emergency Management Agency to local authorities, it should also challenge the massive spending of those federal agencies to do the jobs they now say belong to states, cities and counties. Had a terrorist blown up the levees instead of Katrina, should we then have expected President Bush to blame the failure to respond on local government?

Beneath a Meth Moon A Novel Jacqueline Woodson Nancy Paulsen Books: 189 pp., $16.99, ages 12 and up If there's any common thread among drug addicts, it's an aversion to feeling uncomfortable emotions. The cause of the emotion is unimportant. What matters is the individual's inability to deal with it healthily. This unsettling cause-and-effect pairing has long been a theme in the ever-expanding young adult canon, but it gets a timely makeover in "Beneath a Meth Moon.

Nine Lives Death and Life in New Orleans Dan Baum Spiegel & Grau: 336 pp., $26 -- Although it grew out of his reporting on the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina for the New Yorker, Dan Baum's extraordinary book reads more like fiction than journalism.

If it had not caught the attention of a handful of important readers, Jesmyn Ward's "Salvage the Bones" would most likely have quietly faded into obscurity; many worthy books do. Now, however, this novel about a poor Mississippi family in the weeks leading up to 2005's Hurricane Katrina has a prominent place in bookstores and boasts the gold medallion that comes with winning the 2011 National Book Award. Book awards are marvelously idiosyncratic. While major film and music awards are based on the votes of a large group - meaning there is a general consensus or popularity - book awards are frequently selected by just a few people.

Hurricane Katrina may have emptied whole sections of New Orleans, but it hasn't set in motion the great national diaspora that was widely foreseen. Instead, the vast majority of displaced households are staying close to their former homes, postal records show. A Times analysis of address changes after the hurricane also highlights the metropolitan area's sharp distinctions of class and race. Poor blacks from the city were more likely to land farther away in places much different from home.

New Orleans' black population dropped 57% a year after Hurricane Katrina, while the white population declined 36%, according to an analysis by three demographers of new U.S. census data that confirm the disaster's disproportionate impact on the city's racial composition. Billed as the "first full picture" of the mass migration after the hurricane, the analysis also found that New Orleanians displaced to Houston and other cities were more likely to be black, uneducated and poor.

Hurricane Katrina stole much of New Orleans' physical distinction, but it couldn't kill its spirit, rhythm or soul. The changes wrought by storm and flooding have brought an indecision that lingers for some, but life goes on for others in what many here call the "new normal." Emblematic scenes such as Mardi Gras' second-line music and dance parades and the crowds drawn to the springtime Jazz & Heritage Festival were a reassuring sight after the horror of the storm.

. -- It is just an empty lot, a block from the beach, with nothing to mark it but the Biloxi Tour Train parked outside, loudspeakers blaring. The story that wafts through the thick, hot air is a standard Southern tourist tale: of Indian skeletons discovered under the floorboards of an art gallery and now exhibited through plexiglass cut into the floor. But then Carla Beaugez, the driver and tour guide, pauses the CD. "That was recorded before Hurricane Katrina," she says softly. "On Aug.

A sodden, slow-moving Hurricane Katrina lumbered ashore on Florida's densely populated southeastern coast Thursday, toppling trees that killed two people, knocking out power to more than 1 million households and dumping so much rain that widespread flooding was feared. "This isn't so much a windstorm as a rainstorm. It's the flooding we're worried about," said Judy Sarver, Broward County communications director. Citing Katrina's "tremendous rain," Gov.

Kara Keyes bought the black-and-white pit bull as a puppy five years ago, intended as a Valentine's Day gift for her husband. But the dog -- named Crown for the C-shaped mark on her head -- soon came to adore Keyes. When Keyes sat on the porch of her New Orleans home, the dog would wriggle between her legs and rest her head on Keyes' lap. "If I move, Crown moves," Keyes said. "If I stop, Crown stops." Dogs came and went, but Crown, as Keyes said, was "my first baby."

Jesmyn Ward's "Salvage the Bones," about a family hit by Hurricane Katrina, receives the National Book Award for fiction. The novel, her second, is a surprise winner. On a night of literary honors, Jesmyn Ward's "Salvage the Bones," about a family hit by Hurricane Katrina, received the National Book Award for fiction on Wednesday at a black-tie gala in New York. Ward's novel, her second, was a surprise winner. The National Book Foundation, which sponsors the awards, presented two of its five major prizes to African American women.

By now, of course, the key details of former national security advisor and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice's "No Higher Honor: A Memoir of My Years in Washington" have already made it to public view. Among them: She clashed over policy with Vice President Dick Cheney and Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld. Libyan strongman Moammar Kadafi had an unnerving fixation on his "African princess," which revealed itself in a bizarre private dinner in his kitchen. She regretted the timing of a vacation just as Hurricane Katrina was bearing down on New Orleans.

President Obama's initial response to Hurricane Irene showed how thoroughly elected officials at all levels have absorbed the lessons of Hurricane Katrina six years ago. Now — with the role of government already an issue in the 2012 campaign — the recovery phase offers Obama an unexpected opportunity to restore at least a measure of public trust and goodwill at a time when being a part of the federal government has threatened to become a...

Former President George W. Bush was conspicuously absent from the midterm election campaign, despite Democratic efforts to resurrect him as a political punching bag. But just a week later, the former president is back in the public eye, launching a publicity tour for his book "Decision Points," which comes out Tuesday. The tour includes a prime-time network special and a visit to Oprah's couch. The book's excerpts and the interviews offer new insight into Bush's presidency, but show a familiar certainty and self-assuredness about the decisions he made.

Reporting from Arlington, Texas What Hurricane Katrina did to Ron Washington's New Orleans home in 2005, the Texas Rangers manager nearly did to himself in 2009, his use of cocaine during "a weak moment" sparking a controversy that nearly swept him out of the game. "I thought my job was over," Washington, 58, said. "I really did. " The rebuilding of Washington's home, reduced to the studs by flooding and high winds from the devastating storm, is nearly complete, thanks in part to about $68,000 in donations from players such as Miguel Tejada and Jason Giambi.

Not the president he voted for Re " Obama looks to home front," Sept. 1 The real headline for The Times' front-page article on President Obama's speech is several paragraphs down: "He offered no new proposals to address those woes. " We need something new. I thought I was voting for a Roosevelt. I got a Hoover. I don't know what the Republicans are complaining about. Their Wall Street is the only thing that has recovered. Don Ricketts Santa Clarita Given Obama's redirection of priorities and resources to domestic problems, House Republican leader John Boehner asks a valid and important question in his call for the president to detail what the U.S. response should be if Iraq spirals into chaos.

In this city of so many linguistic influences, Hurricane Katrina is the latest to reshape the colorful local tongue. You hear it all over town: for instance, a supermarket, where two friends were reunited like thousands of others after exile in whatever city Katrina blew them to. "How's ya' house?" Walter Thompson inquired cautiously of buddy Mark Smith. Thompson was speaking what has become the new, oft-repeated greeting in this city of wrecked homes and dislocated people. "How's ya' house?"

The effort in Congress to offset some of the costs of Hurricane Katrina has split Republicans so sharply that Congress may not approve the spending cuts it had planned before Katrina. In the House, the hurricane prompted the Republican leadership to back a package of offsetting cuts that were too little for some conservatives but too much for some moderates. As for the Senate, it is having a hard time agreeing on the shallower cuts it had planned to make pre-Katrina.

Five years after Hurricane Katrina, President Obama recommitted the nation to repairing the Gulf Coast as the region's fragile recovery hangs in balance and his popularity sags after the BP oil spill. Obama underscored the optimism and frustration in New Orleans, a city that shows signs of renewal despite lingering devastation. Residents worry the nation will leave them behind, fatigued by the one-two punch of the hurricane and oil spill. Obama seemed intent on convincing them otherwise.

LaTrell Washington, one of 25 recruits at the New Orleans Police Academy, said what everyone was thinking when she addressed her class at their graduation ceremony this month. "Mistakes have been made before our time," she said. "We are here to change the image of the New Orleans Police Department. " The cadets are the first to graduate under a new mayor and a new police superintendent who have done something that for this city is unprecedented. This spring they invited the Justice Department to help them clean up a police force that many think had crossed the line from petty corruption to brutality and murder.