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A Storm Called Katrina by Myron Uhlberg and illustrated by Colin Bootman

Review by Chris Singer

About the author:

Myron Uhlberg is the critically acclaimed and award-winning author of a number of children’s books. He has authored five children’s books, among them the Schneider Family Award winner “Dad, Jackie, and Me.” He recently published a memoir of his life in Brooklyn, New York, growing up the oldest hearing son of deaf parents. A retired businessman, Uhlberg lives with his wife in CA.

About the illustrator:

Colin Bootman was born in Trinidad but moved to the United States at the age of seven. A graduate of the School of Visual Arts in New York, he has illustrated numerous books for children, including Dad, Jackie, and Me. Almost to Freedom was a Coretta Scott King Illustrator Honor Book. Bootman lives in New York City.

About the book:

Ten-year-old Louis Daniel hates it when Mama treats him like a baby. But when Hurricane Katrina blows through the Gulf Coast on a fateful August night, followed by broken levees and rising floodwaters threatening New Orleans, Louis feels like a little kid again. With no time to gather their belongings save Louis s beloved horn Daddy leads the family from their home and into an unfamiliar, watery world of floating debris, lurking critters, a winsome black-and-white dog, and desperate neighbors heading for dry ground. Taking shelter in the already-crowded Superdome, Louis and his parents wait and wait. As the days pass, the electricity goes out, the air conditioning dies, the bathrooms are closed, and people around them begin to bicker as they run out of food and water. When Daddy fails to return from a scouting mission within the Dome, Louis knows he s no longer a baby. It s up to him to find Daddy, with the help of his prized cornet.

My take on the book:

Everything I’ve ever read by Myron Uhlberg has been outstanding and although my daughter is a bit young for some of them, I have been collecting them for her to read when she’s older. A Storm Called Katrina is no exception and might be Uhlberg’s most powerful book yet.

The power in this story comes through the eyes of ten-year-old Louis Daniel. We follow Louis’ journey with his parents after they are forced to leave their home to seek refuge at the Superdome. Through Louis, we see the fear, sadness, devastation and tough choices people face during a natural disaster.

It’s hard to believe Katrina happened 6 years ago (we’re coming up on the “anniversary” this August 29th) and while most of the country hasn’t thought about Katrina in a long time, the devastation is still very real for many as recovery is still ongoing in parts of New Orleans.

As such, the release of this book is very timely and along with the beginning of a new school year throughout most of the country, teachers can discuss the anniversary of Katrina with their students. I recommend teachers and librarians look to

So I was listening to one of the morning shows yesterday and an interview with the former mayor of New Orleans, Ray Nagin, caught my attention. He had just written a book about his experiences during Katrina threaded with a post analysis of the disaster, an event and period of our history of which just about everyone in the world has some memory. Images of people stranded on roofs and those held hostage in the Superdome are seared in our collective memory, and now with the internet, seared in the digital memory of history.

It was an interesting interview for many reasons, and given his fame as the mayor of New Orleans at such a dramatic time, and given the bad press that the administration at the time received, it wasn’t surprising that a book was written about it nor was it surprising that it was receiving national media attention. What was surprising - at least to me - was that at the end of the interview, he quickly added that he published it through Create Space and it was available through Amazon.

His reasons for choosing CreateSpace are clarified in an interveiw published on USAToday at the following link:

http://www.usatoday.com/life/books/news/2011-06-20-ray-nagin-katrinas-secrets_n.htm

Here's the paragraph that is most telling:

The book covers the first 30 days after the storm. The outspoken Nagin says he chose to self-publish on CreateSpace, a division of Amazon.com, after contacts with publishers left him worried about the editing process, feeling uncertain "that my voice would come out at the end of the day."

Just goes to show us that if the subject is notable enough and the author famous enough, even a self-published book can receive national attention. But it also shows that more and more writers are choosing non-traditional publishing paths to have more control over the process, especially when it comes to preserving their voice.

I am driving up to TN this weekend to speak at the Southern Festival of Books. I looooovvvvvveeeee road trips. With the changing leaves it should be a gorgeous drive up. Hope to see you there.

I will be presenting on a panel “Katrina’s Children: Moving Beyond the Storm Together” with Jewell Parker Rhodes (yippie!) on October 10, from 1:00-2:00PM at the Southern Festival of Books in Nashville, TN.

He’d been alone a lot. Not lonesome in the sad sense of the word... he was used to it.
There was that woman, once. She stayed for a while but, eventually, she drifted away.
There were the two dogs, of course, so he wasn’t really alone. Just no people around regularly.
He wasn’t sure if he owned the dogs or they owned him. He didn’t think about it like that, anyway.
Ownership, laws, rules. Like the soldiers and media types in the boat who came by.
They were so sure that it was necessary, mandatory, even, that he leave. They tried to convince him to join the rest of the evacuation.
They could shout and roar and threaten but they’d never catch him.
They wore gloves and masks and worried when they got a bit of water on them.
And here he was, paddling, belly down, his inner tube and plastic container, to the grocery store.
The water stank and there were turds floating by, but he’d seen the kids of Bangkok swimming in the filthy canals when he was there on R&R from Nam.
They survived. In fact, the Thais were some of the strongest. Some of the toughest.
He paddled with his right hand to turn left. Up to the park where the tops of the swings were still visible and across the submerged boulevard to the mall.
All but the hardiest and most determined had given up shopping here. It wasn’t really shopping, you didn’t pay for anything, most of the valuable stuff was gone, looted. What were they going to do with the electronic appliances and games, anyway? There was no power.
He drifted in the door of the grocery store.
There were a few pet owners still making regular trips to the store but he doubted that many, if any, had tried the dog food. He found that it didn’t taste so bad.
The cans were safe and the dried stuff, though it was hard to get down from the top shelf without wetting it, was tolerable. Full of vitamins and raw protein. Not processed to taste good for humans like everything else. The dry stuff made up for the lack of vegetables in his diet.
He arranged the bags of dry dog food on top of the cans in the container. He pushed it up the aisle in front of his inner tube.
The Saint Bernard breeder was struggling with a large bag, trying to squash it into the bow of her canoe.
He stopped to help the woman.
They exchanged nods without words. There had been nothing to talk about after the first few days.
The latest gossip and rumours had become meaningless. Especially when they realized that they were stuck with the bodies. Some neighbours didn’t get along with each other, but to see them like that. Talk became trivial, unnecessary.
He nodded goodbye to the Saint Bernard breeder, paddled up the aisle, out the door.
The sun was hot as he headed for home. The dogs’d be waiting.
It was kind of ironic, he mused, as he paddled along. There was Eric Clapton explaining his long fascination with Robert Johnson. That had been the DVD on in the living room when the water started rising.
The hurricane caused more damage than usual. The generator he’d hooked up conscientiously after the last hurricane, was doing fine, until the flood.
An earnest guy from England, an ex junkie, probably one of the best white blues players ever, sitting in a deserted building in Dallas, fifty or sixty years after Robert Johnson recorded there.
Max wagged his tail in time with the drumbeats. Brutus perked up his ears, howled along with the song when the guy accompanying Clapton launched into the electric slide solos.
Then the generator quit because of the rising water. Darkness enclosed them until he found some candles and lit them.
The dogs knew right away. They appeared more anxious every time he looked at them.
From the moonlight reconnoitre, the water first approaching his knees, then rising to his hips, things started looking very

"The ultimate measure of a man is not where he stands in moments of comfort and convenience, but where he stands at times of challenge and controversy"-

Dr. Martin Luther King

In my title, Our City of New Orleans, I'm referring to all of us in America. New Orleans is the soul of our country, and thanks to the help of our great citizens all over America and the rest of the world, she will rise again.

I live eighty miles north of New Orleans in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, and due to the fact that we were out of utilities for weeks after Hurricane Katrina we didn't realize the extent of the damage until our power was resorted.

After which, thousands of New Orleans citizens began to pour into Baton Rouge, particularly after the city was hit again by Hurricane Rita, only a week later.

One of the greatest and oldest city in America resembled a war zone...It's impossible to explain unless you saw it with your own eyes.

I would also like to extend this post, and my heart, to the Mississippi Gulf coast, whose citizens were also affected by the devastating effects of these natural disasters, in addition to the man-made horror the entire gulf coast is dealing with today-

However, if there is a region and a country that will pull through this, it is the deep south, and the United States of America~

TEXT Posted by Ann Clemmons

“Katrina did something to my psyche,” says New Orleans children’s writer Whitney Stewart. Along with her teenage son and her 87-year-old mother-in-law, and with a cast on her own injured ankle, she was rescued by helicopter late at night after five days stranded on the fifth floor of the Tulane Medical School building during the hurricane’s aftermath. It was “a crazy, chaotic, unsettling experience… We’d tried earlier to leave but our rescue boat had been overtaken by people with guns… After Katrina, I needed to do new things. I needed a new paradigm for New Orleans.”

Whitney is now learning to kayak and doing volunteer work with the public schools. On a whim, the former high school actor sent photos of herself, her guitarist son, and her geneticist husband to casting agents; her son landed a role in “Cirque de Freak,” to be filmed in New Orleans this year.

But this writer had an adventurous life long before Katrina. After trekking the Himalaya twenty years ago with her mom, Whitney, who’d discovered her affinity for the biographical form as a Brown undergrad, wrote biographies for children of the Dalai Lama, Aung San Suu Kyi, Deng Xiaoping, Mao Zedong, Sir Edmund Hillary, and the Buddha. Her love of travel has also led her to write two young adult novels that present kids’ eye views of New Orleans (Jammin’ on the Avenue) and San Francisco (Blues Across the Bay).

A primary concern is getting across the message of subjects like the Dalai Lama and Aung San Suu Kyi. Her biography, Aung San Suu Kyi: Fearless Voice of Burma, is soon to be re-issued, with proceeds going to a non-profit that benefits the Burmese cause. “I’m amazed that so few people have heard of her,” Whitney told me.  She’ll tell us about meeting this brave Burmese woman in an upcoming guest blog. Stay tuned!

By Anatoly Liberman

What a blow to national pride: cake is a loanword from Scandinavian, and cookie has been taken over from Dutch! The story of cake is full of dangerous corners, as will become immediately obvious. Anyone who begins to learn Swedish soon discovers that the Swedish for cake is kaka. (more…)

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