Down in New Orleans: Reflections from a Drowned City
Sothern, an attorney, focuses on New Orleans stories that have been largely overlooked by the mainstream press. Everyone saw the chaos at the Superdome, but Sothern talks to people who were there, and refutes count by count the many crimes reported to have occurred inside it. He eloquently and angrily shows how devastatingly easy it can be for those in power to cast aside the rule of law our society relies on. In outrage he recalls how the prisoners in New Orleans' jail—most of whom had yet to be tried, let alone convicted—had to break open their cell doors to swim to safety. He follows the story of residents suddenly arrested as suspected terrorists and held for weeks with no family contact. Sothern's own story of escape and return adds a personal facet to a Katrina book that looks not to the destruction wrought by the storm, but to that caused by the suspension of rights by those in charge of a great American city now truly in ruins. Mondor, Colleen