Path of Destruction by John McQuaid and Mark Schleifstein

You can contact either author via email.

John McQuaid is available via johnmcquaid@verizon.net.

Mark Schleifstein is available via mschleifstein@timespicayune.com.

Katrina was the signal event of the new century, a body blow to the national self-image. Scenes Americans expect to see in far-off, ungovernable countries have now unfolded in the mightiest nation on earth: victims struggling to survive amid depravity and death, an entire city reduced to an empty shell, a diaspora of refugees unseen since the days of the Dust Bowl.

Even as rebuilding gets underway, a sense of shock and confusion lingers. Indeed, sensationalism and political finger-pointing have made it nearly impossible to distinguish the truth from the spin. But now, John McQuaid and Mark Schleifstein cut through the confusion to offer a clear explanation for the greatest natural disaster in American history.

PATH OF DESTRUCTION isn’t just a book about the storm, those who survived, and those who didn’t; it’s also an account into the dreadful inadequacies that existed prior to 2005, an indictment of the Washingtonofficials who failed to act, and a scientific investigation into why these huge storms are coming now.

Brilliantly written and fiercely reported, PATH OF DESTRUCTION is necessary reading for all who wish to understand the past, present, and future of American natural disasters.

John McQuaid is based in Washington, D.C. and does investigative and explanatory journalism, specializing in science and politics. In his 22-year-career, most of it with The Times-Picayune of New Orleans, he has covered presidential campaigns and Congress; Latin America (as a correspondent based in Mexico City); and done a number of investigative projects. His work has won many national awards, including a Pulitzer Prize for Public Service in 1997 (along with “Path” co-author Mark Schleifstein)for a series on the global fisheries crisis.

Mark Schleifstein, co-author with John McQuaid of “Path of Destruction”, has worked at The Times-Picayune in New Orleans since 1984. His reporting during and after Hurricane Katrina was among the newspaper’s stories honored with 2006 Pulitzer Prizes for Public Service and Breaking News Reporting and the George Polk Award for Metropolitan Reporting. Stories by Schleifstein and McQuaid prior to Katrina on hurricanes and coastal science issues were honored in 2006 with a special award from the American Geophysical Union. The 2002 series co-authored by Schleifstein and McQuaid,”Washing Away: How south Louisiana is growing more vulnerable to a catastrophic hurricane,” won the American Society of Civil Engineers’ 2003 Excellence in Media award and the 2003 National Hurricane Conference media award. It also was a finalist for the 2003 Edward J. Meeman Award for Environmental Reporting for newspapers with over 100,000 circulation. Schleifstein and McQuaid also were co-authors of the 1996 series, “Oceans of Trouble: Are the World’s Fisheries Doomed?” which won the 1997 Pulitzer Prize for Public Service and the Sigma Delta Chi Award for Public Service from the Society of Professional Journalists.

Welcome to the brand new official Path of Destruction book website. We will be discussing news related to the book including ways to meet the authors and places to get a copy of your very own. Thanks for visiting.

Most of the other Katrina books coming out are narratives of the storm and its aftermath. Our book has that, of course, but we felt that you cannot really understand Katrina’s impact on August 29 and afterward without looking at what happened months, years, sometimes centuries before that to set the stage.

We tell the whole story of New Orleans’ flirtation with disaster and the heroic, doomed struggle to protect it and its people.

The book starts with a giant hurricane hitting the future site of New Orleans around 900 AD (an event documented by scientists), obliterating Indian settlements. It recounts the city’s founding in a spot below sea level in a swamp, and how repeated bouts with storm and river flooding shaped a unique American city famed for its good-time fatalism. The book tells how the levee system — an ambitious brainchild of the Great Society era — was built, and how it failed. It traces the invention of modern emergency management in the 1927 Mississippi River flood, and its decline under Bush.

The book is also about the great scientific race to defeat the danger: the emerging understanding of hurricanes and storm surges (players include Ben Franklin and Isaac Cline of Galveston flood fame). The book recounts the dogged attempts by a small group of scientists and emergency managers to avert the city’s fate. Our storm narrative aims to show how all the stupid mistakes of the past 300 years — most of them made in the past generation — came home to roost during the week of August 29, 2005.

The book explores the debate over global warming and hurricanes. Bottom line: more big storms are on the way, and there may be no upper limit to their power.

via author John McQuaid’s Amazon Author Blog