And finally we come to the memoirists: Joshua Clark, Chris Rose and Billy Sothern. Forsaking the godly perspective of third-person omniscience, these authors have written first-person accounts of lives destroyed and remade. Their books are memoirs of metamorphosis, with the hurricane serving as the agent of change. Because they share personal stories, still raw, these books will help shape our collective memory of Katrina, reminding us of the disaster's impact at the smallest, most human scale.

Joshua Clark, an independent publisher who survived Katrina in the French Quarter, begins Heart Like Water as a romp through New Orleans's countercultural arts community. The book then becomes a libertarian screed, outraged not just that government failed but that anyone expected the flimsy social contract to withstand Category 3 winds. Finally, it arrives at a communitarian vision, in which the state and its citizens can only prevent another Katrina by working together to save the Gulf Coast's remaining wetlands.

Clark carried a tape recorder with him everywhere he went after the storm, and he includes many of the interviews he conducted verbatim. But the book doesn't succeed or fail based on this conceit so much as the author's willingness to include an unflinching self-portrait. Clark appears hypermasculine and self-absorbed for much of Heart Like Water. He treats his partner, Katherine, who wanted to leave before the storm, terribly. Then, after the city was devastated, Clark remained contemptuous of rumors of suffering and chaos, basing his opinions on the fact that he encountered so little mayhem himself. He was much taken with his own bravado (looting is hilarious!). Because of this narcissism, although Clark was often surrounded by friends, he remained isolated.

And then he gained perspective--literally. Clark climbed a bridge and took in a bird's-eye view of the drowning city. As quickly as that, his tone changes; he gains empathy. The transition, though not wholly convincing, underscores divisions within New Orleans and the way topography became destiny after Katrina. High ground in the Quarter suffered only minor damage, while flooding erased low-lying communities. Before the storm, Clark never considered many of the inundated districts part of his city: "We simply didn't cross the Industrial Canal." Then Katrina expanded his horizons, just as the storm brought many Americans face to face with the realities of race and class in their country.

In 1 Dead in Attic, Times-Picayune columnist Chris Rose is similarly self-reflective about the tragedy. This collection of essays, which were published in the year after Katrina, commemorates the day-to-day struggle of living in New Orleans after the storm: how to raise children without consistent government services; how to remain rooted as one's community fractures; how to survive behind decaying levees. The book includes happy tableaus--working traffic lights, neighbors watering flowers, Dr. John's music--but fatalism gradually erodes hope. The prose becomes angrier, dissonance builds to a crescendo and at last Rose acknowledges his depression. He visits a therapist, gets a prescription and, not without some bumps along the way, begins feeling better. 1 Dead in Attic should not be read in one sitting. The stories bleed together, like impressionism viewed too closely. But consumed over time, in smaller doses, these episodes become, if not a masterpiece, something stirring, beautiful and very sad.

Billy Sothern, a New Orleans death-penalty activist, wanted to remain in the city throughout Katrina. Sothern changed his mind only because of his wife's better judgment and a marriage counselor who helped the couple "make the right decisions in life." The couple's agonized decision to evacuate before the storm hit sets up Down in New Orleans's recurring themes: the ways money insulated the privileged from Katrina's hardships and the hold the city maintains on its residents. The book is only half a memoir, rounded out by Sothern's essays on social justice.

These chapters are invaluable for providing context to Katrina. Disaster narratives typically are teleological, stories in which everything that comes before the destruction is preamble to what now appears inevitable. By including essays on the city's broken criminal justice system, local fights over the minimum wage, the politics of race in neighboring parishes and the history of a largely middle-class and overwhelmingly African-American community destroyed by Katrina's flood, Sothern reminds readers that structural inequalities plagued the city long before Katrina. In doing so, he suggests, if only implicitly, that the storm was just another chapter in New Orleans's history. Tragic, to be sure, but not necessarily the epilogue in a long story peppered with hardship. At the same time, Katrina offered a lens through which Sothern examines problems facing not just New Orleans but the entire nation: "The issues that will define us to future generations--the consequences of conservative governance, our continuing national struggle to confront issues of race and poverty, environmental disregard, mass incarceration, immigration, and the 'war on terror'--appeared in New Orleans as magnifications of the thousands of instances in which these matters arise in daily American life."

Monuments and historic markers dot New Orleans's landscape: Andrew Jackson presides over the French Quarter, General Lee looms high above his eponymous circle, plaques adorn buildings throughout the city's preservation districts. New Orleans markets a usable past, a sanitized version of its history, to tourists in this way. There's no room for disasters in this romantic narrative; being accident-prone is bad for business. So the city sweeps the fires of 1788 and 1794, the yellow fever epidemic of 1853, the 1927 flood and many other disasters under the rug. Except for a small memorial located in the Lower Ninth Ward, paid for in part by a litigation firm trying to drum up business, Katrina has been similarly shrouded in official silence. But there are countless informal reminders of the storm--fallen signs, middens filled with the remains of gutted homes, abandoned FEMA trailers and bare foundations where buildings stood--scattered across the city. And there are books. So even if you can't travel to New Orleans, you can still bear witness to the nation's tacit decision to execute an entire city despite its powerful will to live. If nobody makes the effort now, New Orleans may soon exist only in our collective memories, no longer a living place where history gets made.

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