Draining New Orleans: The 300-Year Quest to Dewater the Crescent City

A Mardi Gras hero named Drainage was Fat Tuesday's carnival king in 1915 when President Woodrow Wilson, phoning in to New Orleans from the White House, signaled the switch that activated the pumps that promised but ultimately failed to stop the city's descent to the sea. So begins Richard Campanella, the author of a dozen readable books about greater New Orleans transformed. His latest work spans three hundred years of small, fateful steps toward technological overdependence. An urban story, a paradoxical tale, its chronicle is tragic but also a tribute to the Jekyll and Hyde of noble intentions. Clearly written, grounded in science, the book aims to understand, epoch by epoch, how the cumulative weight of unforeseeable consequences saved many millions of people while life in the shadow of levees became more hazardous.