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From Publishers Weekly
Starred Review. The physical and psychic dislocation wrought by Hurricane Katrina is painstakingly recollected in this brilliant collection of columns by award-winning New Orleans Times-Picayune columnist Rose (who has already hand-sold 60,000 self-published copies). After evacuating his family first to Mississippi and then to his native Maryland, Rose returned almost immediately to chronicle his adopted hometown's journey to "hell and back." Rose deftly sketches portraits of the living, from the cat lady who survives the storm only to die from injuries sustained during a post-hurricane mugging, to the California National Guard troops who gratefully chow down on steaks Rose managed to turn up in an unscathed French Quarter freezer. He's equally adept at evoking the spirit of the dead and missing, summed up by the title, quoting the entirety of an epitaph spray-painted on one home. Although the usual suspects (FEMA and Mayor Ray Nagin, among others) receive their fair share of barbs, Rose's rancor toward the powers that be is surprisingly muted. In contrast, he chronicles his own descent into mental illness (and subsequent recovery) with unsparing detail; though his maniacal dedication to witnessing the innumerable tragedies wrought by "The Thing" took him down a dark, dangerous path ("three friends of mine have, in fact, killed themselves in the past year"), it also produced one of the finest first-person accounts yet in the growing Katrina canon.
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From Booklist
Hurricane Katrina boosted Rose's career and damn near destroyed his life. A columnist for the Times-Picayune, Rose wrote disarmingly direct, funny, and fully loaded essays about the horrific aftermath of the storm, the terror and loss, injustice and irony. An intrepid explorer of the wreckage, Rose chronicles the decimated city's horrible smell, daunting debris, and Twilight Zone atmosphere. Rose jokes about how Survivor should have been set in New Orleans and tells jaw-dropping and heartwarming stories about chance and stoicism, brutality and heroism. Readers love and rely on his column, which earns him a Pulitzer, and when he self-publishes a collection of his essays, it promptly sells 65,000 copies. But as a conduit for all the sorrows of the lost city, Rose experiences a catastrophic inner storm and candidly reports on his plunge into depression. This frank and compelling collection combines Rose's original book with later dispatches from hell covering all of 2006 and adding up to vivid and invaluable testimony to the true repercussions, public and personal, of the devastation of a city. Seaman, Donna

Review
"The Crescent City's bard"

-- Harry Shearer, The Huffington Post

"These are impressionistic cries of pain and mordant humor...they so aptly mirrored the sense of surreal dislocation experienced by New Orleanians that they turned Rose into a voice of the tortured city."

-- Ken Ringle, The Washington Post Book World

"The most engaging of the Katrina books...packed with more heart, honesty, and wit...Rose was more interested in telling the searing stories of his shattered city than assigning the blame for its demise..."

-- Michael Grunwald, The New Republic

Customer Reviews

Loved this book
I picked this book up when I was in New Orleans in November of 08. I had seen it in several stores in the French Quarter and I was just drawn to it. The last day I was there I decided I had to have it and we tore through the Quarter trying to find it. Once I picked it up I wasn't able to put it down. It made me laugh, it made me angry and on more than one occasion it choked me up. I can't recommend it enough.

Through the Eyes of A Survivor......
We visited New Orleans for the first time since Pre Katrina, for the Sugar Bowl last week.

I was amazed, first, that the city was so, well, alive. That allayed some of my fears, if not all. Going into several shops to find an item for a friend of mine who was a NO resident, I saw copy after copy of this book, and kept being drawn to it.

Finally, on my last day there, I said 'What the heck, I've got a little extra that I didn't spend' and paid the $15. I started reading it immediately, and haven't put it down. It's a longer read than what I usually read (Fiction), and so it's taking me longer, but this book portrays the people of New Orleans in a way that I have yet to see, and probably will not see again.

It tells of the heartbreak, laughter, tears, joy, reunions, coming home for the first time, it tells of all the things that went through anyone's soul affected by Katrina.

It's not a sad book, not all the time. There are chapters that I read with tears of laughter rolling down my face {Running the Barbershop with power from a car battery) and there are chapters that made me think it was I who survived, I could see it, the 9th Ward, the houses, the 'Blue', it was all there in my mind's eye, and I cried inside for those that made it out, and those who didn't. I cried for the couple, the husband who died of a heart attack while the wife held on, trying to stay alive.

I cried for the animals, the thousands that were washed away with the waters.

I cried for Chris Rose, who without him, and his words, I would have never known what it was really like that day, those weeks, those months. He brought me a little closer to the truth, and for that I will always be grateful. I will always have images burned into my mind, but Chris made some of those images come alive with color, and not seem so gray.

Being the wife of a writer/Editor, I know that experiences are the best subject matter. I also know that you have to be a GREAT writer to make it work, and Chris Rose is that.

Althought N'awlins isn't 'home' for us, it has, and will always be a second home. We both grew up vacationing there, living there, even for a time. We both have life long friends who live there. We found out last week that we lost one of those friends, Charles Ramsey, to ALS. We both mourned the loss of everything and everyone in that great city in August of 05.

But yet, we will always return. Going back just made it 'ok' in my heart, I guess, for I'm ready to make it again. The city has come back, yes, there are places that will never be the same, there are things that cannot be replaced, lives lost, families displaced, but, for the most part, NO is still the NO I remember.

I cannot, however, say the same for Biloxi. That, in itself, was a whole other grieving process. So many memories, memories that I will not be able to re-create with my own, washed away that day, only to be held in my mind.

Thank you, Chris Rose, for allowing me to see that it wasn't all horrible, that life will go on, and that New Orleans, as a whole, is a survivor.

Interesting Book - A New Orleans Area Resident Would Enjoy It More
I've read Rose's column in the Times-Picayune. I liked the book because he told his story from his perspective, not someone try to tell the story of Katrina and reverting back to himself. The book is like a diary. The flow could be improved.