Standing in the Need: Culture, Comfort, and Coming Home After Katrina (The Katrina Bookshelf)

Standing in the Need is a path breaking, close-up look at Hurricane Katrina and the travails and victories of a sizeable extended family in southern Louisiana. Some of us rely on stock models and ideas to pursue our work. A few others, like Kate Browne, chart new ways to imagine and make sense of the world about us. I found the book a compelling read, in part because it is not a facsimile. Here truly is an original story, written to be read, about an historic disaster and a resilient family. Bravo…

I finished this book in a few days on the metro -- I really loved the stories that the author was able to tell while also explaining why the hurricane response (and other issues) made it so difficult to recover. There was so much deep engagement and thought about how people live, survive, and thrive. I'll be using this in my courses, citing it, and borrowing the idea of a methods appendix... Very well done - poignant and valuable.

A grand narrative of the strength and resilience of love, the family, community. Wrapped in the scholarly package of ethnography, which draws you in like the most sophisticated fiction, this is a beautifully written story of one family’s resolve in the face of one of the most tragic disasters of our time.

I loved the message, I just think that the author went a little too far in making it accessible to non-academics. A little more data would have been nice.

I’ll post more thoughts here later, but right now I’m just thankful that I’m taking Dr. Browne’s culture of disaster class.

Purchased this book for class. This is the condition my book came in... For $30, I'd expect my book not to be dirty or beat up

I started reading this book for my academic work in disaster anthropology, but was soon engrossed in the world of the Johnson Fernandez family and their experience of life after Hurricane Katrina. Kate Browne's captivating account of this family's path towards recovery makes you feel as if you know them. I shed a tear reading the final chapter. While there is much to be said about the book as an academic endeavour (as other reviewers have), I would also like to underline the utility of the book for disaster relief practitioners. Policy papers, guidance documents, and reports have previously been published on the place of culture in disaster response. These are often dry and rather abstract documents, easily tossed in a pile of other material never to be read, and with recommendations that are often no more helpful than a vague instruction to keep local culture in mind. International and national disaster response efforts give frequent lip service to the need to be locally and culturally sensitive. I would propose that this book should be given to practitioners, over and above any other documents, as it actively engages the reader to consider the place of people affected by disaster (rather than the response agencies) and the intricacy of their culture. Even if the context is completely different, the situations described in this book force the reader to consider how local culture can be more truly represented and taken into account in disaster response efforts. I'm just about to finish my PhD and I can say, without hesitation, that this has been the most enjoyable book I have read throughout the whole degree. I have since recommended the book to both academic colleagues and non-academic friends.

This is an excellent book for classroom use. The clarity of the prose and compelling story keep students engaged. As an instructor at a large public university, I also find that the layers of the ethnography appeal to a diverse student body. My African American students connect to the description of fiercely rooted, large and interconnected African American family--they enjoyed the depiction of family reunion t-shirts: "we have those too!" Puerto Rican students who were displaced by Hurricane Maria and all of us in NJ who experience Hurricane Sandy appreciated the critique of FEMA and federal recovery efforts. This book reveals the relevance of an anthropological perspective in an engaging, accessible manner. A companion documentary, "Still Waiting" brings the stories and protagonists of the story to life. Highly recommend.

Dr. Browne’s novel Standing in Need was an honest, compassionate, and eye-opening. The wonderfully descriptive narrative captured the cherished bonds and sense of place of an extensive extended family and one cohesive unit so beautifully while their world had been torn apart. This heartbreaking, heartfelt page-turner had brought me more understanding of ethnography than I believe and textbook could have. Throughout the novel, I found myself uncomfortably peering into another family’s reality, continuously verbally resounding ‘WHY?!” I was left with a feeling of hope for this amazingly resilient loving family. Conversely, I was left with deep resentment towards a racially discriminatory bureaucracy that precludes deserving people from receiving the same courtesies and resolutions as their white counterparts. And finally, I was left hungry, desiring some delicious, home-cooked gumbo made with the love and specificity that was placed in every giant vat made by the Johnson-Fernandez family.