Awash.

The Great Deluge: Hurricane Katrina, New Orleans, and the Mississippi Gulf Coast, by Douglas Brinkley (William Morrow, 736 pp., $29.95)

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

HAGIOGRAPHER to John Kerry and Jimmy Carter, contributor to Rolling Stone, editor to the late Hunter Thompson, buddy to Sean Penn: Douglas Brinkley is the nation's foremost liberal historian, one whose celebrity extends from academia to the rock world.

Do you want to buy a book from this man anyway? Maybe just this once: The Great Deluge is a mostly down-the-middle account of the week of Hurricane Katrina's assault on New Orleans and the rest of the Gulf Coast. Even historians have beats, and New Orleans is Brinkley's. A professor at Tulane, he's wired, with friends ranging from street preachers to power brokers deep inside the local Democratic-party establishment. Plus, he was there: He rode out the storm in a downtown condo, secured his home, then cleared out his family to Houston. He came back to town a few days later to work the rescue boats.

Like the phenomenon it discusses, this 700-page book is a monster. It grinds through the awful hours of the storm and its aftermath, providing a sweeping day-by-day account that remorselessly, and occasionally indiscriminately, sucks in newspaper clips, thousands of pages of congressional testimony, and hundreds of original interviews.

Brinkley aims at a partial rehabilitation of his city's reputation. Though he's merciless on the politicians, he provides a stunning and rich account of how local first responders--including an army of volunteers, the Coast Guard, National Guard, and, oddly, the Louisiana Department of Wildlife & Fisheries--saved the lives of tens of thousands of their fellow citizens. It is a story I told in abbreviated form here in NATIONAL REVIEW back in October, but most liberals will be startled to learn that many good and important things happened during the first week of Katrina, while the media were spreading false rumors and waiting for "help to arrive."

There's a wonderful cast of characters: Rev. Willie Walker, who tries to herd his flock out of the city, then takes to the boats to round them up afterward; Laura Maloney, an SPCA official who managed to evacuate her four-legged charges, even as the mayor neglected his; Captain Chad Clark of the St. Bernard Parish sheriff's office, barreling through flooded streets on a jet-ski in 60-m.p.h. winds to save a drowning baby and her mother; and dozens more who were neither helpless victims nor anarchic rabble.

While explaining Louisiana's swamps--the destruction of which heightened the city's vulnerability to Katrina--Brinkley mostly avoids those of the fevered Left. Global warming gets a brief nod as a possible contributor to the catastrophe, but the author lays most of the blame for the levees' collapse on the Army Corps of Engineers and a local political class that chose to ignore 50 years of reports, newspaper series, and common-sense observations about the city's vulnerabilities. "For decades," he writes, "university professors all over Louisiana were trying to get government officials to wake up to the dire threat."

Did the Iraq War hamper deployment of the National Guard? "To some extent" in Mississippi, says Brinkley--even as he upbraids Louisiana governor Kathleen Blanco for claiming that "we didn't have our Louisiana National Guard stateside." ("Yes, she did," Brinkley writes.) What about funding shortfalls? "While a $427,000 repair to a crucial floodgate languished in inexcusable bureaucratic delay, the [New Orleans Levee] board went ahead with happier pursuits, building parks, overseeing docks that it had constructed, and investing in on-water gambling.... [The board] seemed to do everything except oversee the levees."

Were blacks disproportionately victimized? Brinkley prefaces the Katrina story with a long discussion of race and class in New Orleans; but he concludes that it was not blacks but senior citizens who suffered the most. (That sort of thing can get you banned from Democratic Underground.)

The book's publication has roiled Louisiana's political system--not because of its overall characterization of the state's political class as bumbling, corrupt nincompoops, but because of its criticism of Mayor Ray Nagin (who was nearing the end of a hard-fought reelection campaign) and its sympathetic portrayal of his opponent, Lt. Gov. Mitch Landrieu. Of course, everyone already knew about Nagin's responsibility for the bungled evacuations, the sunken school buses, the dysfunctional police department, and his near-invisibility in the early days of the crisis. Where Brinkley broke new ground was in giving Nagin's enemies a megaphone for petty personal attacks: Nagin, one says, "seemed to be inching toward a nervous breakdown" during a key Air Force One meeting with the president and Gov. Kathleen Blanco. Blanco herself is described as "flabbergasted by Nagin's performance on Air Force One.... He was unprofessional, and, she feared, unglued."

I'd gladly write a check for a 700-page update in which Brinkley explains why Nagin got reelected anyway; I came away from this book still baffled by Louisiana politics. Basically, the race was between two species of Boll Weevil Democrats: a party-establishment white guy, Landrieu, with vague racial appeal to white voters, vs. Nagin, an insurgent pro-business black guy with vague racial appeal to black voters. A coalition of Republicans and blacks succeeded in electing the lesser of two Weevils--owing, in part, to a backlash against Brinkley's book.

Brinkley has been criticized for being too kind to Governor Blanco, who cooperated with the book and provided him with access to her personal papers. In any normal state, his portrayal of her vast store of inexperience and incompetence in disaster management would send her packing to an instructor's job in Tulane's government department. But he has a soft spot for the lady governor, as I do, because she had one good idea: mobilize rescue teams from the Louisiana Department of Wildlife & Fisheries, the only agency in the benighted state that had a budget line for boats. That saved about 20,000 lives. She also had her moment of courage, when she in effect told the horde of reporters and camera crews in Baton Rouge, each of whom wanted scarce seats on rescue helicopters and boats, to go screw themselves: The space was needed for survivors. Meanwhile, the governor appears to be running for reelection on the strength of the rescue effort Brinkley describes.

Thanks to his local contacts, Brinkley has a fair amount of fresh material on the mayor and the governor. He doesn't bring anything new to the conventional critique of the president, FEMA, and the rest of the federal government: Bush was too detached, FEMA was too incompetent, and the military was too late.

But the book's major flaw--and it is a big one--is the breathlessly worshipful treatment of the national media. You will find no mention here of how every major paper, including the New York Times, the L.A. Times, and the Washington Post, has been forced to backtrack on the most lurid descriptions of murder, rape, and anarchy that dominated coverage on TV and in print for a week: a slander of the city's residents and first responders that is now etched permanently into the American consciousness. The House committee on Katrina, meanwhile, has flayed the media for obstructing relief efforts. For example, relief convoys were delayed when truck drivers demanded to be protected by the National Guard from media-invented snipers. And on TV, the whole rescue effort by thousands of good guys--which Brinkley correctly makes the core of his narrative--was relegated to sidebar status at best by bogus accounts of baby raping and murder victims stacked like cordwood in freezers at the Superdome.

Brinkley was gracious enough to chat with me about the book, despite my rightwing credentials. Why, I asked him, did you ignore the misreporting of the story? He replied, "I cut the media some slack.... The media were reporting what the chief of police and mayor were saying." Fine, Doug, but if that's your take, it is a controversy that belongs in the book, not just in NATIONAL REVIEW--at least if you're interested in restoring the reputation of the city you so obviously love.

Mr. Dolinar is a columnist for Newsday.