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The looter katrina6/18/2023 ![]() ![]() After having read the first few books in the series I felt that only James Lee Burke could deliver a story centered around Katrina that was both evocative and heartfelt ( "bodies wrapped tight like mummies in the gray and brown detritus left by the receding waters.") He does not disappoint. I knew that this story dealt with Hurricane Katrina and it's impact when I first started reading the series. Even if you have never been to New Orleans or Southern Louisiana you will come to know it, to taste the foods, hear the music, see the sunrise on the bayou, or listen to the the rain on a tin roof. His characters are vivid and come alive and you become immersed in the story. James Lee Burke's prose is rich and lyrical. I have been reading all of the books in the Dave Robicheaux series since the beginning of the year. The book that has influenced his life the most is the 1929 family tragedy "The Sound and the Fury" by William Faulkner. ![]() Their daughter, Alafair Burke, is also a mystery novelist. Shortly before his move to Montana, he taught for several years in the Creative Writing program at Wichita State University in the 1980s.īurke and his wife, Pearl, split their time between Lolo, Montana, and New Iberia, Louisiana. He was Writer in Residence at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette, succeeding his good friend and posthumous Pulitzer Prize winner John Kennedy Toole, and preceding Ernest Gaines in the position. He has worked at a wide variety of jobs over the years, including working in the oil industry, as a reporter, and as a social worker. He attended the University of Louisiana at Lafayette and the University of Missouri, receiving a BA and MA from the latter. He has twice received the Edgar Award for Best Novel, for Black Cherry Blues in 1990 and Cimarron Rose in 1998.īurke was born in Houston, Texas, but grew up on the Texas-Louisiana Gulf Coast. James Lee Burke is an American author best known for his mysteries, particularly the Dave Robicheaux series. This is not just a superb crime novel, it is potentially THE fictional chronicle of a disaster whose human dimensions America is still struggling to process. You can feel the undercurrents of rage and pain beneath the narrative, making this not only his most personal and deeply felt book for some time, but quite possibly his best novel to date. The nightmarish landscape created by Katrina seems the perfect setting for Burke's almost Biblical visions of good and evil - it is as if he had to wait for this disaster to find the occasion to match his emotionally supercharged prose. The story begins with the shooting of two would-be looters in New Orleans during Hurricane Katrina, and then follows a motley group of characters - from street thugs to a big-time mob boss, from a junkie priest to a sadistic psychopath - as their stories converge on a cache of stolen diamonds, while the storm turns the Big Easy into a lawless wasteland of apocalyptic proportions. But amid images of black looters, some sympathy threatens to give way to anger and disdain.This is James Lee Burke's latest mystery featuring Dave Robicheaux. No one questions that whites have been moved by the suffering of blacks, and vice versa. "And I don't expect that feeling to go away anytime soon." "Black people are mad because they feel the reason for the slow response is because those people are black and they didn't support George Bush," said Ron Walters, a professor of government and politics at the University of Maryland. In conversations at restaurants, homes, offices, on talk radio and online, it's clear that many blacks and whites view the effects of Katrina differently.Īlthough no group is monolithic in opinion or emotion, many blacks are outraged that so many of their own were left behind in New Orleans with no evacuation plan and no urgent effort to rescue them. Nobody wants to see any American suffer." But people are doing what they can for Americans. "The African-American community has obviously been very heavily affected. "That Americans would somehow in a color-affected way decide who to help and who not to help, I, I just don't believe it," she said. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, the most prominent black person in the Bush administration, downplayed the criticism. ![]() These are American citizens," Watson said. "'Refugee' calls up to mind people that come from different lands and have to be taken care of. ![]()
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