The book by Gary Rivlin closest to the heart of the Reader will always be his first. Rivlin was fresh out of Northwestern when he started covering the Harold Washington era for the Reader back in the 1980s. His copy required heavy editing, but his stories were special for what they didn’t do: they didn’t share the mainstream media’s bewilderment and panic at the sight of an insurgent black mayor challenging the familiar white faces that ran Chicago. Rivlin got what was going on, recognized it as healthy, and explained it. Never was an alternative newspaper’s alternative viewpoint more necessary.
Just out: Katrina: After the Flood, in which Rivlin answers these questions. “My fifth book,” he says, “and it’s by far my hardest and by far my best. I think I was rewriting Fire on the Prairie except it was a flood. And I’ve got a bigger stage—Katrina was even bigger than Harold.”
When Rivlin left New Orleans in 2006 it was because he had to—”I was allergic to mold,” he explains. “I’d take cortisone shots but they were wearing me down.” He was covered with rashes. An optimist, he’d figured New Orleans would quickly rebuild and in three years he’d write a book about it, but that didn’t happen. He quit the Times in a buyout in 2008, freelanced, wrote another book, and put New Orleans behind him. But a few years ago he and his editor, Ben Loehnen of Simon & Schuster, were talking over book ideas.
But there was nothing in the Times review that Rivlin appreciated as much as a judgment in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch: “well-reported, deftly written, tightly focused.”
