D’Ann Penner received her Ph.D. from the University of...

D’Ann Penner received her Ph.D. from the University of California at Berkeley, where she studied belief and resistance among Cossacks, farmers and women in the formative years of the Soviet Union. Keith C. Ferdinand is a clinical cardiologist, who was previously the Medical Director of Heartbeats Life Center and Professor of Clinical Pharmacology at Xavier University College of Pharmacy in New Orleans, Louisiana. Overcoming Katrina: African American Voices from the Crescent City and Beyond, is a collection of 27 interviews of people who dealt with multiple issues of abandonment, evacuation, displacement, and having to rebuild their lives after Katrina. The authors have divide the book up in four different sections that split the†¦show more content†¦Throughout the book, there is a feeling of distrust with the narrators, because, like many others, they felt as if they had been betrayed and that the levees were not properly maintained. The authors back this theory with the 1924 incident when levees were blown up to flood the black neighborhoods, to save the predominately white ones. I do feel that instead of interviewing friends and relatives of co-author Keith Ferdinand, others should have been used to make it less of a personalized book for a group of individuals. I also feel that the authors should have provided the questions asked by the interviewer, leaving the book in it’s original transcription. For me personality, this was an excellent book and was an easy read, due to the fact that it flowed so well. You can place yourself in the shoes of each narrator and feel what they felt.as they went through this trying time in their life. The older narrators give the reader a lot of their lives and you really see their struggles to come up during a time of segregation and racism. These were educated individuals who came from average backgrounds. Through the eyes of the narrators you can visualize the neighborhoods they grew up in, you get a g limpse of what their family life was, and briefly go through Katrina with them. In the â€Å"Coming of Age† section you see life from the perspective of the youth in Katrina. Before Katrina these young men were plagued with a life of violence