REVIEWS BY DIANN BLAKELY

Any crisis as monumentally god-awful as Hurricane Katrina generates many testaments. We need them. As we approach the storm's third anniversary, here are two very different views of New Orleans in the time of Katrina.

The title of Phyllis Montana-Leblanc's Not Just the Levees Broke is derived from Spike Lee's documentary about Katrina. A poem Montana-Leblanc had written the night before Lee paid her a final visit in her FEMA trailer gave him the ending to his work; and he, in turn, was the impetus for her book. Though her language is, for the most part, plain and repertorial (and at times appropriately profane), we see Montana-Leblanc's lyric gifts in the first pages' description of Katrina's clouds, "dark gray, light gray, white, and almost black. . . . They're all separated, as if they know once they connect all hell will break loose." Montana-Leblanc's nightmarish tale fulfills the prophecy in those clouds.

The evacuation order comes too late from Mayor Ray Nagin. One by one, the floors of the apartment complex where Montana-Leblanc, her husband and other members of her family have taken shelter are torn off by the wind. Debris flies outside, projectiles of death. Her family is split up, first by the storm, then by officials. For eight days, Montana-Leblanc and her husband trudge, nearly sleepless, soaked in foul water and mostly without food, from dry spot to dry spot, waiting in line after line after line, until they are airlifted to San Antonio. The racism that was all too evident on big-screen TV—one of LeBlanc's chapter headings recalls the prevention of the Red Cross from entering the state while military forces were marshaled, officials fearing rioting blacks more than being concerned with helping people—is microcosmically revealed when she realizes that Cheetos are being given only to white people in one feeding station.

Montana-Leblanc's story may not be the best-written account of Hurricane Katrina, but it is surely among the most harrowing and enraging.

Not Just the Levees Broke
By Phyllis Montana-Leblanc
Atria, $20
240 pages, ISBN 9781416563464

By contrast, Julia Reed's The House on First Street is distinguished by its elegance and wittiness, as well as its poignancy and civic-mindedness. Told by a 40-something woman of privilege, one who could afford a TV-watching companion for her cat while Reed led a split existence between the Big Apple and the Big Easy, she is ultimately a woman without any true home until she moves permanently to New Orleans and finds, first, true love, and then, the city of her heart in ruins.

Reed, a contributing editor to both Newsweek and Vogue, was born in what was the wealthiest, most urbane city in the Mississippi Delta. Greenville, also the native ground of Shelby Foote and Walker Percy, was, like its larger, more sophisticated sister to the south, nearly destroyed by the Mississippi River flood of 1927. Thus it's in keeping that a beautiful but decaying New Orleans house owned by another Percy becomes home to Reed and her new husband just weeks before Katrina hits.

The house remains a wreck, though largely unscathed by Katrina, and the horrors of home renovation—and the devastation wreaked elsewhere in the city—are almost a match for Reed's descriptions of the glorious, spiritual delights of food. She chronicles with obvious glee the progressively better meals she manages to offer an entire contingent of Oklahoma National Guardsmen stationed down the block to fend off looters at a time when almost no city stores are open and no city, state, local or federal officials are to be seen.

Despite Reed's self-deprecating generosity, also seen in her loving commitment to both new and lifelong friends, to neighbors, to various people who have worked for her, and to an improbably sweet-natured crackhead she tries again and again to redeem, Reed ensures that we do not mistake her for Mother Teresa. The tantrums she throws at contractors attract neighbors and passing cars; she lapses into what she later concedes is a "Marie Antoinette moment" while she cleans out the rotted contents of her (predictably) stuffed refrigerator after 12 electricity-free days; and her scorn for then-Louisiana governor Kathleen Blanco and Nagin practically curls the pages.

Some readers will be tempted to condemn The House on First Street as trivial or paternalistic in comparison to Montana-Leblanc's book. But Reed marries, and finds her place in New Orleans, to earn what Montana-Leblanc possesses at the beginning and end of her tale: a family and roots too deep for any hurricane to destroy, despite the anger and tears and grievous loss wrought by our country's greatest naturaldisaster.

The House on First Street
By Julia Reed
Ecco, $23.95
208 pages, ISBN 9780061136641

Diann Blakely's third poetry collection, Cities of Flesh and the Dead, to be published this fall by Elixir Press, takes its title from a work set in New Orleans.