Reviewed by:

• Katrina: A History, 1915–2015 by Andy Horowitz
• Cornelis Disco (bio)

Katrina: A History, 1915–2015 By Andy Horowitz. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2020. Pp. 296.

A history of Katrina from 1915 to 2015? A century of history? But wasn't Katrina a natural event, a hurricane that wreaked havoc and destruction along the Gulf Coast, flooded New Orleans, and then went away again? Not if you ask Andy Horowitz. He sees Katrina as not just a passing storm, but as the inevitable culmination of a century of disaster-in-the-making. For a storm like Katrina to become a disaster, he argues, nature's momentary fury is not enough; disasters do not just impinge on society, they "come from within."

And so Katrina is an extended exploration of hurricane Katrina's specific "within." Horowitz relentlessly pursues how the history of New Orleans, Louisiana, and the United States produced Katrina over the course of a century. The main ingredients are greed, corruption, the 1927 Mississippi River flood, the gulf oil industry, the Army Corps of Engineers, sub-standard levees, the pre-1994 Democratic Party, and racism by the bushel.

Horowitz's argument, drawing on a version of the sociology of disaster articulated by Kai Erikson, has the potential to make a radical contribution to the history of technology. To be sure, we have our own proper tradition of disaster studies. And in this tradition, disasters (like Three Mile Island, Challenger, or Tacoma Narrows) are also generally framed as the perverse interaction of long-embedded socio-technical traditions, routines, and systems with proximate breakdowns and human error. We have Erikson's Yale colleague Charles Perrow to thank for this concept of "normal accidents." Horowitz has taken this to another level by showing that the logic of perverse deep structures not only clarifies breakdowns in large and complex socio-technical systems, but can also explain what are commonly called "natural" disasters. These too are embedded in "deep" history, though a far more inclusive and heterogeneous one than the socio-technical normalities underlying Perrow's approach. [End Page 584]

The five chapters of the book are framed by an introduction and an epilogue. The introduction lays out the idea of disasters as long-term social constructions and previews some of the main issues involved in the Katrina disaster. With the body of the book divided into two parts, the first describes the political, cultural, economic, and technological germination of Katrina over the course of the twentieth century (chs. 1, 2, and 3). Getting its own chapter, Hurricane Betsy (1965), a disaster in itself, clearly revealed the fault lines making an even more destructive successor like Katrina nothing short of inevitable (ch. 3). The book's second part deals with the devastation of Katrina itself and the reconstruction efforts that followed. The epilogue is a somewhat wistful reflection on how Katrina has made space for chilling visions of a new New Orleans: a safe and antiseptic modern city estranged from its historical cultural roots.

The writing is masterful, at times transcendent. Despite the book's conceptual quest, Horowitz manages to stay close to the skin. The text abounds with first-person accounts, newspaper clippings, official documents, and personal histories. Though Horowitz's guided tour along the long muddy road of Katrina's making and aftermath inevitably has its tedious moments, there are villains and angels aplenty to keep the plot moving along.

The downside of Horowitz's deep delving is that the tragic etiology of Katrina fills the whole screen. This lends credence to the pessimistic conviction that societies—specifically (southern?) American society, or perhaps all liberal democratic (especially federalist?) societies—congenitally and inevitably produce disasters. Though there may be a grain of truth here, surely this is not the whole story. May not our better angels sometimes work at mitigating disasters? In the Dutch polity, for example, despite egregious historical lapses, it is not enabling floods, but predicting and preventing floods, that rules—at least for the time being. Here, not only disasters, but effective protocols for disaster management, have emerged "from within." While...

审核人：

• 卡特里娜飓风：历史，1915-2015 安迪霍洛维茨
• 科内利斯迪斯科（生物）

卡特里娜飓风：一部历史，1915-2015年，安迪·霍洛维茨着。马萨诸塞州剑桥：哈佛大学出版社，2020 年。Pp。296.

卡特里娜飓风从 1915 年到 2015 年的历史？百年历史？但卡特里娜飓风难道不是一个自然事件，一场在墨西哥湾沿岸造成严重破坏、淹没新奥尔良然后又消失的飓风吗？如果你问安迪霍洛维茨，就不会。他认为卡特里娜飓风不仅是一场短暂的风暴，而且是一个世纪灾难的必然结果。他认为，要使像卡特里娜这样的风暴变成一场灾难，大自然的一时愤怒是不够的；灾难不仅影响社会，而且“来自内部”。

所以卡特里娜是对卡特里娜飓风特定“内部”的扩展探索。霍洛维茨无情地追寻新奥尔良、路易斯安那州和美国的历史如何在一个世纪的过程中产生卡特里娜飓风。主要成分是贪婪、腐败、1927 年密西西比河洪水、海湾石油工业、陆军工程兵团、不合标准的堤防、1994 年之前的民主党和蒲式耳种族主义。

霍洛维茨的论点借鉴了凯·埃里克森 (Kai Erikson) 阐述的灾难社会学版本，有可能对技术史做出根本性的贡献。可以肯定的是，我们有自己的灾害研究传统。在这一传统中，灾难（如三英里岛、挑战者或塔科马海峡）通常也被认为是长期嵌入的社会技术传统、惯例和系统与直接故障和人为错误的反常相互作用。我们要感谢埃里克森在耶鲁大学的同事 Charles Perrow 提出了“正常事故”的概念。霍洛维茨通过展示反常深层结构的逻辑不仅澄清了大型复杂社会技术系统的故障，而且还可以解释通常所说的“自然”灾害，从而将这一点提升到另一个层次。[第584页结束]

本书的五章由引言和结语构成。导言将灾害作为长期社会建设的概念进行了阐述，并预览了卡特里娜飓风中涉及的一些主要问题。本书正文分为两部分，第一部分描述了卡特里娜飓风在 20 世纪的政治、文化、经济和技术萌芽（第 1、2 和 3 章）。获得自己的章节，飓风贝齐 (1965)，本身就是一场灾难，清楚地揭示了断层线，使得像卡特里娜飓风这样更具破坏性的继任者几乎是不可避免的（第 3 章）。这本书的第二部分涉及卡特里娜飓风本身的破坏和随后的重建工作。

写作是大师级的，有时是超越的。尽管这本书的概念追求，霍洛维茨设法保持贴近皮肤。文本中包含大量第一人称叙述、剪报、官方文件和个人历史。尽管霍洛维茨在卡特里娜飓风的制造和后果的漫长泥泞道路上的导览游不可避免地会有乏味的时刻，但仍有大量的恶棍和天使让情节继续推进。

霍洛维茨深入研究的缺点是卡特里娜飓风的悲剧性病因充满了整个屏幕。这证明了悲观的信念，即社会——特别是（南方？）美国社会，或者可能是所有自由民主（尤其是联邦主义？）社会——先天且不可避免地会产生灾难。尽管这里可能有一定的道理，但这肯定不是故事的全部。难道我们更好的天使有时不能减轻灾难吗？例如，在荷兰政体中，尽管发生了令人震惊的历史失误，但它不是促成洪水，而是预测和预防洪水——至少目前如此。在这里，不仅灾难，而且有效的灾难管理协议都“从内部”出现了。尽管...