Heart Like Water: Surviving Katrina and Life in Its Disaster Zone

by Joshua Clark

Book Overview

Try it. Right now. Picture the lights going off in the room you're sitting in. The computer, the air conditioning, phones, everything. Then the people, every last person in your building, on the... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1416537635
• ISBN13: 9781416537632
• Release Date: July 2007
• Publisher: Free Press
• Length: 368 Pages
• Weight: 1.25 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.1" x 6.4" x 9.2"

Customer Reviews

Clark poured out his heart, like water.

Joshua Clark's HEART LIKE WATER is powerful, poignant, touching and amazing unlike any other book I've read about surviving a disaster. Street-wise Clark takes readers through the French Quarter's back alleys, to indestructable bars that stayed open during the hurricane, and out-lying areas not mentioned in news accounts. With a beautiful, gritty writing style, he gives us the perspectives of people who could be easily over-looked but whose experiences take us as close to the eye of the hurricane, and its terrible aftermath, that out-siders can get. This book will prove to be the quintessential Katrina chronicle for years to come. Ghost Hunter's Guide to New Orleans

An Eyewitness Account

Clark, Joshua. "Heart Like Water: Surviving Katrina and Life in the Disaster Zone: A Memoir". Free Press, 2007. An Eyewitness Account Amos Lassen and Literary Pride If you try to imagine what Hurricane Katrina was like, you cannot possibly come anywhere close to the horror and the anguish that we went through. I lived through it and find it hard to bring those images back into mind. I often think that it is a period of my life that I do not want to remember. On the other hand, it was Katrina that caused me to land in Little Rock, Arkansas and my life to take an entirely new path. Joshua Clark did not leave New Orleans during the storm. Instead he stayed and got together with several others and pooled resources and used their energy in an attempt to save the city. At the time that Katrina hit, Clark was working as a correspondent for NPR and began a project of recording the voices of victims of the storm in the Gulf South. It is these voices that are the spine of this memoir which does not dwell on the horror and devastation of Katrina but shows the compassion, the anguish and the kindness, the madness and the mercy of the people of America. Written in journalistic style but displaying raw emotion and innocence, Clark tells us of loss and renewal and the ability to bounce back with hope. There are and there surely will be more Katrina stories. Clark's book is unique in that it is a love story--a paean to the city he loves. The city was destroyed and lives were torn asunder. Yet Katrina also caused an inner impact that Clark so beautifully gives us in this book. What he writes will wrench your heart but it is all true--it all happened. Not an easy book to read, "Heart Like Water" is poignant and evocative and larger than life. Written in the first person, it is the story of one of the most terrible periods of American history and is entertaining but important as well as a look at how people face change, adjust to it and survive. There were times as I was reading that I felt like I had a pill in my throat that I could not swallow--the emotional experience was that strong. The book is raw and reveals a look at the people affected by the storm from an angle we have not yet had. Clark relates the happenings of the storm as they happened and we get the truth without sermonizing. Clark moves from an observer to an active rebel to a mystical madman, a victim of trauma and a political activist. He saw the pain and suffering and he lets us see it. We feel for the people who lost everything (I know how it feels because I lost all except what I was wearing) but we also see a new approach to loss-that which is not lost--the love for a place and its people. Everyone asks what it was like when the levees broke. Look no further, it is all here in this wonderful memoir of a terrible time.

The story we never wanted to live - the story he never wanted to write

Louisiana is about life: a rich, full, raucous, outrageous will to life, claiming itself no matter what. Here, about fifty miles north of New Orleans, it was 5:45 in morning when the power went down. It would be 5:45 PM, eighteen very long, very hard, very hot days later when the power came back on. During that time we had no true pictures of what our beloved city was going through, nor the coast, nor the surrounding parishes--just voices on the radio crying of the horror and soul-tearing destruction which Katrina had wrought. When the power came back on, we began to get an idea, only an idea because pain like that, loss like that does not truly translate into camera shots, into sound bytes. Joshua Clark's Heart Like Water:Surviving Katrina and Life in Its Disaster Zone is heart-tearing, mind-bending, for those who love the Gulf Coast, who love the Crescent City, because it is intensely, oh so intensely, personal. There is something resilient, heroic, about folks who love their city taking brooms to hand to clear the banquettes; there is something life-affirming in reading of those same folks clearing the streets for emergency vehicles to pass through. Joshua Clark's Heart Like Water takes us back to 1718, when New Orleans first began, yet to become the realization of insight, far sight, and a dream of an incredible port city. She is a dream carved out of the river lands; a vision birthed so long ago, held onto with desperation in the post-hurricane times despite intense heat, suffocating humidity, ravenous mosquitoes, and other things best left in dark corners and crevices unseen, but so visible after these storms. Joshua Clark's Heart Like Water makes this catastrophe personal be it the missing fingers of Jesus behind the St. Luke Cathedral; sheets, or a mud filled sock, hanging suspended from a tree in Lakeview; the devastation of the 9th Ward; the wave-eaten town of Waveland on the Mississippi Gulf Coast--gone, just gone, pulverized by wind by the first eye wall; tidal surged and dragged out to sea by the heart of Katrina, pulling out every cell of the town. Josh and a handful of others stayed--to witness, to tell the story of the heart of the Crescent City being bled by Katrina. They stayed, they survived to share the story--to take us to the warehouse that was filled with produce while people hungered in the Superdome; to that same warehouse as it blows sky high with its adjacent building, yet another victim of the post storm chaos. It is Josh who baptizes himself in the muddied waters of the main water artery of this country, as he eases himself into the mighty Mississippi in a kind of spiritual joining. Josh and those with him have lived in a place apart--lived in it, lived through it--and found parts of themselves that could survive it all, just as New Orleans and the rest of the Gulf Coast has. He tells us a story of the city; of parishes and counties; of a coast ripped, blown, muddied, burned and gouged apart--that can only b

The BEST Book Written About Hurricane Katrina!

Wow. Despite the tragedy that frames this book, it's one of the most wild, roller-coaster, entertaining reads I've ever had. It's the story of families forged in crisis, how people banded together and survived amongst the hurricane's aftermath in the French Quarter. One of the most memorable characters here is Ride who was the neighborhood's makeshift medic before the Red Cross or any EMS could get in. He sewed a guy's ear back on, healed wounded animals, treated gangrene on a woman who swam out of the floodwaters straight to Johnny White's bar which refused to close for one second. In the second half of the book, as electricity finally returns to their neighborhood, Clark and Ride travel to all the other regions, documenting the human details left after the wind and water, the sediment and sentiment there, in a way far deeper than any news broadcast could ever do. Some of the questions Clark faces: Where does your heart go when you must choose between the first place that ever loved you, and a person you love more than you ever thought was possible? And how do you, against all odds, make it through the hard time with a tear in your eye and a smile on your lips? This is a must read for every American.

This is the Katrina book we've been waiting for...

I thought no way could this book live up to its amazing blurbs. I was wrong. This is an adventure story, a survival tale, a love story. This book is a bit like Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas meets The Day After Tomorrow -- except of course it's in the real life inferno of New Orleans rather than an imaginary frozen New York City. This is the story of those who stayed behind in the city they loved. It's what is was like to live -- not as a journalist, but as a citizen -- in a modern American city completely emptied of people and electricity, amidst our nation's greatest tragedy. This is the only time this has ever happened in America. And so far this is the only book from from someone who was there the entire time. But the book is not only from Clark's perspective -- it is the voices of the hundreds of people he recorded over two months in every neighborhood and every last region the hurricane struck, including Mississippi. It is these elements combined -- an oral history measured with a first person insider perspective -- that render it a unique testament, that make it both more intimate and more comprehensive than the Katrina books we've seen so far, and indeed make it an amazing read even if Katrina had never happened. This is not a book about politics and fingerpointing. Instead, Heart Like Water is witness to what we as Americans are capable of when our civilization is stripped of modernities and laws, the morals that remain, the tug of war between utopia and Lord of the Flies. Clark has that rare power to be funny as heck and heart-breaking all in the same paragraph. He puts us there, tells us what it's like walking on the windows of skyscrapers, and pulling stars out of the bottoms of his feet; cleaning up fallen brick walls with bleeding hands to make way for emergency vehicles; getting the first katrina tattoo using a Mag Lite and car battery while the Mayor asks for 25,000 body bags over the radio; having the police draw guns on him in the middle of the night, threaten to shoot him and his girlfriend, handcuff them outside his aparment; cooking gourmet desserts with anything he and his friends can find over a mound of burning sticks; watching and feeling their neighborhood blow up in the middle of the night on his birthday; the way a dog will curl up on the concrete slab foundation of his old home at exactly the spot his favorite couch used to be; a house that appeared across St. Louis Bay in Mississippi after the storm and no one knows where it came from; crawling through the crushed frame of peoples' homes with them looking for a child's pictures. But do not think this is some morbid Katrina sob story. It is one of hope and humor, which is how they survived.