Chris Rose (1) (1960–)

Award winning Times Picayune columnist Chris Rose was literally embedded with his story, fleeing hurricane Katrina right before it hit. He sent his family to safety in Maryland while he continued to live, work and report on life in New Orleans in the months that followed. This is a compilation of his columns which still appeared when the Picayune could only publish on-line for a time in the aftermath of the storm. It's difficult to maintain journalistic objectivity when you're living the story, so Rose can hardly be blamed for the toll his reporting took on him personally. It's a harrowing story that doesn't shy away from the horror or the hope.… (plus d'informations)

This sounds like a ridiculous criticism given the subject matter, but I found this book far too sentimental. Chris Rose was a beat reporter at the Times-Picayune when Hurricane Katrina smashed into New Orleans, and in the aftermath he started writing these short columns about how the city was recovering and how the community was coping; they're supposed to be snippets of personal commentary rather than journalism per se, which perhaps explains the register. Nevertheless, for me the saccharine emotionality of Rose's writing detracted from, rather than reinforced, the impact of what he was describing.

In an open letter to ‘America’, published in September of '05, he introduces the area in a way that gives you a good idea of his general tone:

I suppose we should introduce ourselves: we're South Louisiana.

We have arrived on your doorstep on short notice and we apologize for that, but we were never much for waiting around for invitations. We're not much on formalities like that. …

We're a fiercely proud and independent people, and we don't cotton much to outside interference, but we're not ashamed to accept help when we need it. And right now, we need it. …

When you meet us now and you look into our eyes, you will see the saddest story ever told. Our hearts are broken into a thousand pieces.

But don't pity us. We're gonna make it. We're resilient. After all, we've been rooting for the Saints for thirty-five years. That's gotta count for something. …

So when all this is over and we move back home, we will repay you the hospitality and generosity of spirit you offer us in this season of our despair.

That is our promise. That is our faith.

There's really two options when writing about very serious and traumatic situations: either you become as dry as humanly possible (on several occasions I've sat in newsrooms next to people who were openly sobbing as they typed up their notes, but to read their report you'd think they were observing what happened from a distant satellite, not covered in blood and shit in the middle of what was happening – and the story became devastating through that distance); or, you go full gonzo and do a first-person subjective immersion à la Tom Wolfe or Hunter S Thompson.

Rose chooses not to attempt the former, and is not able to do the latter because, as he says, he himself suffered nothing more serious that a broken drainpipe on his house. So he's stuck in this awkward no-man's-land, inhabiting a kind of borrowed communal misery, buttressed with folky false modesty and clichés of determination, which is completely understandable and even admirable but which doesn't make for powerful journalism.

I feel really bad criticising this, since it's obvious that Rose was utterly traumatised by Katrina – ‘it beat the shit out of me,’ he says – and indeed, a lot of what is in here reads less like a chronicle of a ruined city, and more like a chronicle of someone succumbing to PTSD. (Rose in fact became addicted to antidepressants during this period and separated from his wife.) Still, I wish there had been a little more journalistic examination of the situation – the class and race issues which Katrina brought into such sharp relief are almost entirely absent here.

These columns do make for a revealing snapshot of what a city looks like after a big disaster (so much of what was in here reminded me of being in Port-au-Prince after the earthquake), with the lines of refrigerators on the streets, the fallen trees, the smell of masonry dust and decomposition, the hair-trigger emotions of everyone left. It's partly an audience problem. These pieces didn't connect well with me as an outsider, but when Rose wrote them, they were aimed at his fellow Louisianans, and for that audience who understood exactly what he was going through they probably worked really well.… (plus d'informations)