Description
New Orleans after Katrina — from street level. When Hurricane Katrina devastated the city in August 2005, Canadian writer Marcy Italiano and her husband “G” went to see it for themselves. Katrina and the Frenchman is her first-person journal of what they found: flooded neighborhoods, displaced residents, and a city struggling to survive in the storm’s aftermath.
Rather than reporting from a distance, Italiano walks the ruined streets and listens — recording conversations with survivors, volunteers, and the locals who refused to leave. The result captures the chaos and grief of those first weeks, the failures of the official response, and the unexpected generosity that surfaced among neighbors with nothing left to give. Italiano never looks away — from the failures of the official response or from the small mercies that kept people going.
Raw, immediate, and deeply human. Essential for understanding what Katrina felt like on the ground — not on the news.
Katrina and the Frenchman: A Journal from the Street
When Hurricane Katrina devastated New Orleans in August 2005, Canadian writer Marcy Italiano and her husband “G” went to see it for themselves. Katrina and the Frenchman is her first-person journal of what they found on the streets: flooded neighborhoods, displaced residents, and a city struggling to survive in the storm’s aftermath.
A Street-Level Account of the Disaster
Rather than reporting from a distance, Italiano walks the ruined streets and listens. She records conversations with survivors, volunteers, and locals who refused to leave, capturing the chaos, grief, and unexpected generosity of those first weeks. Published in 2009 by P.I.C. Publishing, the journal reads as both testimony and elegy — an unfiltered look at one of the worst natural disasters in American history through the eyes of someone who stood in the wreckage.
Why Read It
Italiano writes with a journalist’s eye and a poet’s ear, and the book is haunted by the music she made around it, including her song “Thursday Morning.” For readers of disaster reportage, memoir, and American social history, this is a raw, deeply human document — a reminder that behind every headline about Katrina were ordinary people, and streets, that would never be the same.
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