Last August, 2015 was the tenth anniversary of Hurricane Katrina, which greatly affected the greater New Orleans area of Louisiana. New to our collection is a graphic novel depiction of this event titled Drowned City: Hurricane Katrina & New Orleans, written & illustrated by Don Brown. Considering many graphic novels are fictionalized stories, this is a very moving, illustrated portrayal of an environmental disaster appealing to children and adults alike.
I have also been reading a book on Hurricane Katrina that portrays the dire circumstances endured by one of the New Orleans hospitals. It is titled Five Days at Memorial: Life and Death in a Storm-Ravaged Hospital, by Pulitzer Prize winner Sheri Fink. Without giving too much of the plot away, medical personnel in the hospital started making life and death decisions regarding Do Not Resuscitate (DNR) patients who were barely hanging on to be rescued. I am citing this book because below are two illustrations from the above mentioned graphic novel, depicting the harrowing situations faced in some of the flooded hospitals.
While we do not carry Fink’s book in our library collection, I will demonstrate how to request an item by Interlibrary Loan in my next blog post! But if you can, read these two books together as they complement each other rather nicely.
Drowned City can be located in our catalog here.
Read an excerpt of Sheri Fink’s Five Days at Memorial here and see if you would like to order this from another library. If you would like to request a certain item be added to our collection, fill out the form here.