Tonight's Top Stop: Douglas Brinkley on Katrina

Map It:  Van Ness 

WITH HURRICANE SEASON starting next week, it's strange to consider all that has happened in the months since Hurricane Katrina hit the Gulf Coast, burst New Orleans' levees and uprooted hundreds of thousands of people. There is much talk about rebuilding New Orleans, but to date, much of the city lies abandoned, its population scattered and politicians in Louisiana and Washington, D.C., battling over what to do. Historian Douglas Brinkley of Tulane University started on his latest book, "The Great Deluge: Hurricane Katrina, New Orleans, and the Mississippi Gulf Coast" last November and will be speaking about the book -- which looks at the political storm that followed Katrina as much as at the storm itself, along with the personal stories of surviving the disaster -- tonight at Politics and Prose.

"I see this book as an opening salvo in Katrina studies," Brinkley told the New Orleans Times-Picayune earlier this month. "It is not definitive. It may be idiosyncratic in some places, but it has everything I have -- every physical and intellectual resource in my being -- poured into it."

Since much of the battle to rebuild the Gulf Coast is being waged in the nation's capital, Brinkley should provide some interesting perspective on what's on the horizon for the beleaguered region, just as another potentially busy hurricane season looms.

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