Doug Brinkley's chronicle of Hurricane Katrina has the drama and desperation of a Russian novel, the government intrigue of a Washington whodunit, and a keen sense of history and context due to the author's standing not only as a journalist and historian but as a New Orleans native."
– Graydon Carter

"The horror that was and is Katrina takes on new meaning when viewed through Doug Brinkley's brilliant historical lens. He brings us a riveting story of the natural and man-made disasters that deluged the body, but not the soul, of one of the world's most intensely alive cities. And descriptions of the devastation along the Mississippi Gulf Coast are downright heart-stopping."
– Cokie Roberts

"Brinkley's account is an intriguing stew...the writing soars...If journalism is history's first draft, then The Great Deluge is 1.5"
– USA Today

"Harrowing tales....compelling. Pungent details that most news organizations were too gentle to dwell on."
– Los Angeles Times Book Review

"Genuinely riveting survivor stories..."
– Washington Post Book World

The new past master...Doug Brinkley is fast taking over as
America's historian."
– Chicago Tribune

"Fascinating"
– St. Louis Post Dispatch

Weathering a storm of questions about Katrina
June 11, 2006 | The Buffalo News | Edward Cuddihy | Full Review
"This is not the hit-and-run pseudo-journalism of the 24-7 television news screamers, this is in-the-trenches journalism. No interview is overlooked as too insignificant. No detail is too small to pass up. And no question is too far off the mark to pose." READ FULL REVIEW >

New Orleans In a Tempest Over 'Deluge'
May 19, 2006 | Washington Post | Peter Whoriskey | Full Review
"Rarely has a work of history figured so prominently in a mayoral election here or anywhere else. "The Great Deluge," by Tulane University historian Douglas Brinkley, covers a week of the Hurricane Katrina debacle and depicts New Orleans Mayor C. Ray Nagin as too vain, too stunned and too paranoid to have been effective in the city's crisis." READ FULL REVIEW >

Dirty water
May 19, 2006 | Financial Times | Andrew Ward | Full Review
"For four sweltering days after Hurricane Katrina, the Love family was trapped on the top floor of their New Orleans home surrounded by filthy, snake-infested floodwater. A Coast Guard helicopter eventually spotted them but had room for only the children. Six-year-old De’Mont-e Love was winched to safety along with his five-month-old brother, leaving their distraught parents behind." READ FULL REVIEW >

Portraits of the Catastrophe Known as Katrina
May 16, 2006 | NY TImes | By Michiko Kakutani | Full Review
"The historian Douglas Brinkley's harrowing new book, "The Great Deluge," captures the human toll of Katrina as graphically as the most vivid newspaper and television accounts did, and by pulling together a huge, choral portrait of what happened during that first week of havoc and distress (from Saturday, Aug. 27, through Saturday, Sept. 3), he gives the reader a richly detailed timeline of disaster — a timeline in which the sheer cumulative power of details impresses upon us, again, just how abysmally inept relief efforts were on every level, from FEMA to the Red Cross to the New Orleans Police Department, from the federal government to state and local authorities."
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Best-selling author, Tulane historian writes
first major book on Katrina
May 15, 2006 | Shreveport TImes | By John Hill | Full Review
"BATON ROUGE -- Tulane University historian and best-selling author Doug Brinkley is passionate about Louisiana, about New Orleans and about telling the story of the week that Katrina grabbed the world's attention."
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New and Notable book reviews
May 14, 2006 | The Arizona Republic | Anne Stephenson | Full Review
"Last year Brinkley left his New Orleans home and went to a 15th-floor condominium to ride out Hurricane Katrina. On Aug. 29, from his window above the city, he saw "a stunning aberration": The Mississippi River was flowing backward, driven by the approaching storm. As author and historian, he tries to be evenhanded in this big and inevitably chaotic book about what happened to the Gulf Coast, but his view is also personal."
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This time, it's personal
Historian Douglas Brinkley poured 'everything I have' into his book about Katrina
May 9, 2006 | New Orleans Times Picayune | By Susan Larson
"I started feeling the Katrina revisionism, the news fatigue," Brinkley said, recalling the events of last fall. "I knew the media trucks would pull out. I started seeing Congress not appropriating the money, started hearing people say why should we save New Orleans, reading books like Tom Piazza's 'Why New Orleans Matters.' READ FULL REVIEW >