The Washington Post When Hurricane Katrina roared ashore on August 29, 2005, federal and state officials were
not prepared for the devastation it would bring. In this searing indictment of what went wrong, Christopher Cooper
and Robert Block take readers inside FEMA and the Department of Homeland Security to reveal the inexcusable mismanagement
during the crisis--the bad decisions that were made, the facts that were ignored, and the individuals who saw that
the system was broken but did nothing to fix it.
In this award-winning and critically acclaimed book, Cooper and Block reconstruct the crucial days before and after
the storm hit, laying bare the government's inability to respond to the most elemental needs. They also demonstrate
how the Bush administration's obsessive focus on terrorist threats fatally undermined the government's ability
to respond to natural disasters. The incompetent response to Hurricane Katrina is a wake-up call to all Americans,
wherever they live, about how distressingly vulnerable we remain.