Surviving Katrina : the experiences of low-income African American women / Jessica Warner Pardee.

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Living in New Orleans when Hurricane Katrina slammed into the city in 2005, sociologist Pardee (Rochester Institute of Technology) wanted to understand how low-income black women transferred their everyday survival strategies to the context of a major disaster. How did characteristics such as race, class, gender, and age affect the abilities of low-income black women to "recover" from a major disaster? As the author muses, "Is recovery back to a disadvantaged position really recovery?" Pardee interviewed 51 low-income black women (mean age 50), most with high school educations or less. Though her sample was small and not representative of all low-income black women residing in New Orleans, and she did not offer any other groups for comparison, the author concludes that for such women, post-disaster recovery was not possible because of the dearth of jobs, social services, medical care, and affordable housing and the difficulty of reestablishing systems of kin-based support. Although Pardee might also have considered how the hurricane impacted people of other racial or ethnic backgrounds or different economic circumstances, her ethnography provides eye-opening insight into the experiences of one subset of people whose lives are defined by their incomes. --Carol Apt, South Carolina State University