Why New Orleans Matters pre book club

Before I start to read Why New Orleans Matter by Tom Piazza I want to talk about why I chose this book. New Orleans to me is an almost mythic city. It has a culture so incredibly different and seemingly more interesting than the one I have grown up in. The appeal of the city itself and the tragedy of Hurricane Katrina are more than enough to pique my interest, but the thing that drew me in more than anything else is that I have learned a lot about people and government from this city. It would have been hard to imagine before Katrina that a major city could be destroyed so quickly. So much history lost in a matter of days. In the aftermath it became apparent that people were forgotten and that we were supposed to ignore this fact. Even now I have read about how people are not getting what was promised to them by the city, state, and federal government. I hope this book can shed some light on what New Orleans means to the people who live there, and what the cultural cost of Katrina has been.