Russel L. Honoré

General Honoré is CNN's lead expert on disaster preparedness. He has served in a variety of planning and response operations, including Hurricane Floyd, Isabel, Charley, Frances, Ivan and Jeanne. In this book General Honoré writes to encourage Americans to adopt a culture of disaster preparedness. He explains how our culture has moved far from a mind-set to protect our communities from the harm that nature and our fellow humans can do. But we can learn from our experience and history and change our culture into on of preparedness.… (mehr)

Russel Honore (b. 1947) is a recently retired 3-star US Army General who was in command of the Federal military relief operations for Katrina. He is of Creole descent and became something of a popular hero in the press for his straight shooting non-nonsense tough guy attitude. While Brown of FEMA and other state and local leaders lost control on TV pointing fingers, yelling mad and even crying - Honore was always there tough as nails getting things done. In this memoir he recounts what happened and along the way dispels popular myths about who was at fault and why, in particular related to the Superdome debacle. In the end he concludes it's a systemic failure of a culture quick to blame and slow to take up a can-do attitude of being prepared for a disaster. To that end he has found it his "life's mission" to teach and educate on being prepared, this book is just part of a larger lecture tour, classes and other programs he has undertaken.

Survival can be approached in a number of ways: 1) as an autobiography of Honore, 2) as a first-person history of Katrina, 3) an "after-action" report on what went wrong and what could be done to improve it in the future and 4) a guide for the average citizen on ways to be more prepared, physically and psychologically. Not being a public official, I found it most interesting as a history of Katrina by a key leader who was there, it brings clarity to an event surrounded by a lot of confusion and politics.

Honore admits early on he is not a great writer and the book is co-authored by Ron Martz who no doubt technically wrote much of the book. However the voice of Honore is clear and pronounced - Honore is a great speaker and most likely much of it was dictated and cleaned up for the page by Martz. Honore's personality and character come across clearly, he communicates well and gets the ideas across with occasional humor and grace. It reads quickly and I often had trouble putting it down.

Overall, even if your not interested in the "preparedness" angle, it's well worth reading just as an easy accessible first-person account of Katrina. It's not authoritative - that may come later by an archival based professional historian cranking out a 880 page tomb - but it is easy to read and clears up a lot of misunderstandings. And in the end you may even find yourself agreeing with Honore about being prepared. Today as I write this review, the news is full of stories about a Mexican swine-flu, it may be nothing or it may be the next disaster.

--Review by Stephen Balbach, via CoolReading (c) 2008 cc-by-nd… (mehr)