Books

Three years after Hurricane Katrina became the costliest natural disaster in U.S. history, Ken Wells' The Good Pirates of the Forgotten Bayous offers a human touch and a compassionate voice to many of its overlooked victims.

Acknowledging that much has been written about the storm's effect on New Orleans, Mr. Wells uses his Louisiana-bred background to tell the story of the shrimpers of St. Bernard Parish. The book benefits from Mr. Wells' experience on the ground right after Katrina, when he arrived as part of The Wall Street Journal's team of reporters. His personal touch makes this book exciting, ghastly and emotionally moving.

The soul of the book is a shrimper named Ricky Robin, whose ancestors arrived in Louisiana as far back as the 18th century, with storied family connections to none other than the famous pirate Jean Lafitte. At one point nicknamed "the marshal of Violet Canal," Mr. Robin is a proud, resourceful local who loves the life of a shrimper, no matter its risks.

At the outset of The Good Pirates, Mr. Wells places us in high anxiety aboard the "Lil Rick," Mr. Robin's 56-foot steel trawler he built himself, tied up at dock but already in trouble. As the water rises, Mr. Robin and his family are forced into an ever-desperate scramble to survive.

Mr. Wells follows that with the ordeal of Charles "Charlo" Inabnet, who symbolizes many bad-luck stories of Katrina. After abandoning his house, he takes refuge in a neighbor's home, which also collapses; he then lashes himself to a tree to keep from being blown away by the wind. The 60-year-old survives, only to have to walk, wade and swim for miles to reach shelter the next day, struggling through the devastation, without food or water.

As with much of the best nonfiction, The Good Pirates develops a rhetorical momentum as it speeds toward the end of its story. Mr. Wells, a regular attendee at the annual Mayborn Literary Nonfiction Writers Conference, describes the anger of the local residents, infuriated with both the Army Corps of Engineers and the Federal Emergency Management Agency. The locals nicknamed Katrina "The Federal Storm," believing that most of the devastation could have been prevented, if not for the disastrous consequences of the Mississippi River-Gulf Outlet, otherwise known as MR-GO, which exacerbated the storm surge and flooding that caused the most damage.

In his novels Crawfish Mountain and Junior's Leg, Mr. Wells tends toward the outlandish, delivering a comic punch with a wink and nod. In this work of nonfiction, he wisely keeps a straight face and lets the characters' actions (often heroic and always gripping) tell the story of tragedy, triumph and the unsurprising ineptitude of our government. With another potentially deadly storm bearing down on Louisiana, it's not only relevant and timely, it's a terrific read.

William J. Cobb's latest novel, Goodnight, Texas, is out in paperback.

Fighting to Save a Way of Life in the Wake of Hurricane Katrina

Ken Wells

(Yale University Press, $24)

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