orleans? i was on a plane in a day or two. that was suffering but the thing of the journalist wanting to be part of the story. from the moment i got here -- make i wasn't the typical journalist. most of the media in those first days, weeks and months, after katrina, were focused on those first days. how and why did the levees fail? how did the most powerful country on earth fail so miserably to rescue the tens of thousands of people who were trapped here for five days, six days, seven days. there was talk of euthanized patients in a hospital, and there was just a grisly task of counting the dead. all of that is really important, the central journalism but my fascination for whatever reason was, what are you going to do

now? the water is going recede. the national guard came and took control of the city, but what next? 80% of the city was covered in water. 110,000 homes in just new orleans were flooded. around 20,000 businesses. most of the schools were flooded. the electric system was practically destroyed and had to be rebill. the rest of utilities -- there's 250 billion-gallons of water on the streets of new york -- excuse me -- new orleans, and the think about water is it's really heavy, so it broke the streets. broke the sewer pipes, broke the gas pipes, and you can't just turn on the gas if there's broken pipes everywhere. you had most of the city's buses destroyed. there were 24 street cars that flood it at a million dollars apiece, half the fire equipment, fire engines, quarter of the

police vehicles, you had a -- the police headquarters was flooded. the criminal courts were flooded. evidence rooms were flooded. destroying evidence that was necessary to prosecutor people. the morgue was flooded there wasn't a working 9-1-1 system, and on the flipside, you had virtually every business closed. i was down here for "the new york times" for eight months. i go to the economic development department and the revolving door was blocked by wood. you had to use a side entrance to get into the economic development, which i thought was so symbolic of six months later how wounded the city was, and the director told me that 21,000 out of 22,000 businesses in new orleans, six amongst after katrina, were still close it. where was the sales tax going to come from? property tax? who is paying property tax on a

drowned home they didn't even have the ability to send out the property tax bills to ask for the money. so i just seemed this extraordinary moment in urban history, new orleans after katrina is called the worst urban disaster in modern u.s. history. we had to go back to 1096 and the earthquake in san francisco, chicago in the 19th century, galveston in 1900, to find a city damaged this badly. in fact, professor powell, who is sitting right right here, told me it's the largest diaspora that he knows of going back over 100 years-forget the -- 1.2 million people had to evacuatement unparalleled in modern times in this country. so new orleans is a cultural jewel, on extraordinary city. what was going to happen? you had forces in washington, dc -- the republican president, republican controlled senate, republican controlled house.

you had people publicly saying, i don't think there's the money to rebuild that whole place. dennis hastert, then speaker of the house, saying it should be bull delwareed. how is the city going to recover? what would it take? what was the will? so i just got done telling you how my focus was on the recovery, and in fact that is most of my book, but i do open the book with the blockade of the crescent city connection, more of n the vernacular, the mississippi river bridge, i call it the greater in bridge. for the shorthand, and i want to read also piece because as much as my fascination was with re rebuilding, i was really preoccupied by what happened on the gretna bridge. we have this story we tell ourselves, and it's ontrue,

september 11th in new york city is a good example. after a crisis we all come together. right? black, white, rich, poor, doesn't make a difference, near this crisis together. this is beautiful, beautiful notion, and often is true. but then there's the gretna bridge. if it was up to me the gretna bridge would be synonymous going back in time with howard beach, with ferguson, missouri, with west baltimore after freddie gray died. just one of those incidents that really shows that race is just underneath the surface. so, a few things before i read. you all in the audience here understand, but perhaps others don't, that the crescent city connection, the gretna bridge was the escape route for a lot of people. from the center of town, the way from flooded new orleans to the dry part was glowing across the

mississippi -- was going across the mississippi and all. it was shut down by the gretna police depth, city of 18,000, and the sheriff's. i they actually had no right to do that. it's a state-run bridge. the governor could shut down the bridge, the secretary of transportation could shut down down the bridge but they had no right and when the governor at the time found out that they'd shut down the bridge, she was furious but of course says to much chaos going on there, a failure of communication, took a couple of days before she learned what was going on. and it really didn't have to be. i'm not going read this section but a piece of what i write about is on wednesday evening, a police sergeant in gretna and two other officers did this extraordinary thing. coming over the bridge, the first exit is going to be gretna, and he just stationed two police officers there while he was working, whatever communication equipment he had, to try to get buses, make sure

everyone is orderly in a 12 hour period, they were able to get 1500 people out of town. but for some reason, that was pretty much the end of it. the next morning the gretna police, the sheriff in jefferson parish, the bridge police, got together and decided to close it down. one last piece add ago to the chaos, the craziness. so the bridge is locked but the mayor, who is hold up in the hyatt hotel with his staffing her has no idea. he has his communication director on her black blackberry tap out go to west bank, it's dry there. so the city is sending people over the bridge. and they're being blockaded. so the scene is a group of 300 transit workers, bus drivers, dispatchers and all, the workers

and they're families. the rga headquarters is in a part of the city that never flooded, but of course after katrina it did and there was water everywhere. tuesday morning, their low on water, low on food. the generator flooded. and so they broke into two groups. anyone who wanted to walk through the water up on the elevated highway and try to make it over the gretna bridge went one way. those who were scared of that, didn't feel capable of doing what would be a six mile walk, decided to stay hunkered down and hope that boats come to rescue them. a little past noon when the first rta employees dropped themselves into the dark murky waters that were chest high, 2/3 of the group, 200 people, chose to walk rather than remain. children were hoisted on air mattresses along with most everyone standing under maybe five feet five inches tall. those tall enough to walk slumlord through the smelly, oily water, guiding the others

on the makeshift rafts. sharon paul, 50-year-old dispatcher was a diabetic who had gone more than 24 hours without insulin but paul was a strong swimmer, she help a pregnant woman heft haves on to a mattress. she then tied a rope around her waist ask toed the three of them. i'm done but you need to walk another four or five miles. a police officer walked at the front of the line. rubin stevens, police lieutenant and several other officers retreated to the become of the group to rang nil strays. people passed the superdome, standing like a giant space ship next to the highway and stared. some had been at the dome as recently as sunday, where orderly lines of people were waiting to be patted down. people checked for weapons, before they're admitted to this, quote, shelter of last resort. now thick crowd of people milds everywhere and the national guard stood holding weapons. pete's of the roof peeled off.

the hyatt looked worse. almost every window was shattered. they passed by five or ten people but no other contingent as large as theirs and nonseem to be walk withing the same purpose. the terrorism was in the 90s on a soupy, humid day. that had an expensive view of watery new orleans,. all the strongest among them kept walking, the bridge ahead led to algiers, the new orleans neighborhood on the other side of the mississippi. only later did they appreciate that it was also the route to white flight suburbs search as gretna, the town they reached. at least one of them was in a wheelchair, which ranks included grandmothers, toddlers and police officers. none seem to be thinking about what it meant there was an almost all black group heading into a white community. a bus driver were the first to notice the blockade.

initially malcolm butler thought his eyes eyes were playing tricn him. he was set to retire after 33 years on the job. on august 31st. the next day. their home in new orleans east had most certaintily flooded. then there were at the fresh honor are odd the walk to the interstate. butler, who is not tall, walked the greasy water up to his neck, is no nose and chin pointed upward, guiding dorothy, who clung to an air mattress. they had been on the interget store less than an hour, enough that theirlights dried out. when butler stopped and asked dorothy if she was seeing what she was. a pair of police officers blocking their passage. they were standing up there with if the automobiles blocking the bridge with shotguns and m16s, telling us we 0 could go no further. willford, the police officer assigned to walk point as they headed toward the west bank, figured around 100ars from foot of the bridge when he saul the

two police officer cars parked nose to nose, forming a wedge to block their passage. eventually hear them yelling go back, get off the bridge. the noticed their black uniform, members of she small force policing the bridge. he was wearing a shirt with police on the. he wore a gun. her asked the others so slow down. the smaller of the two bridge cops, young black woman, didn't care what it said on his shirt. the closer he got, the louder she seemed to scream. she was out of control, he said. she was irate. you got to bring it down a few notches, he said, looking at the female of. you're another 10, we need to you to bring it to 3. he was coining a less experience officer but she remain belligerents. stevens, the police lieutenant, came up from the back of the ranks and explained a group of city worked on duty at the time of the storm had gotten trapped

by the flooding. only trying to reach their facility in algiers where buss would pick them up. you're not crossing my damn bridge, the i police officer ponded. you better get your ranks. pedestrians are not allowed on the bridge at any time, she counter. as. she was hollering issue lolls my house, i lost everything, but al adamant. you ain't going nowhere. and at the back of the line, sharon paul, the diabetic dispatcher, was looking at the police cruisers parked blocks away until someone told her police say we can't cross. she look at them, at her friends and said, don't they know we got water in new orleans? so, i'm here in new orleans, which feels different than talking about this book in other places, at the risk of a bad punishing that's you're probably hearing too much, deluged with

the coverage of memories. i argue what has been going on is that it's kinds of a replay of that -- those first months. most of the attention is being paid to those first horrific days. there's sad stories, important stories to share and tell: ...

>> he never recovered from that. you had mayors race. it was bad timing, too. six months after katrina there was a scheduled mayor's race that was delayed and politics is playing an essential role. you had a circus of an election with 20 candidates. the debate was an msnbc. a city electing a mayor and they broadcast the debate nationally.

then there was just the over day h heroics. the sewer and water board i don't expect they are spoken positive very often of but they were amazing after katrina. the u.s. army core of engineers tells the city it is going to take at least 80 days to de-water the city, to dry out the city. sewage and water did it in 11 days. i mean, you know, it was just extraordinary. and then you had these every day heroes. someone in this room from lake view isn't involved in politics but her community is destroyed and what is she going to do? she steps up and i maintain her pre-katrina self would not recognize who she is. i just love that. people made over it.

max mcclen in the lower ninth war. i said you are the black conito. an apolitical guy never got involved and i don't want to get involved. he used the expression the mardi gras way of live. don't take it seriously. you cannot change things. it is a corrupt city. you had people stepping up and you had people shrinking. ray nagan is one of them. i feel like he had one great moment. the thursday after the flood. katrina hit monday morning, the city flooded immediately, many people think it is tuesday but

within an hour the levy failed. monday, tuesday, wednesday, it is finally thursday. no buses and 25,000 people at the super dome and 20,000 at the convention center and thousands more on the highway and that is when he got on the radio and said to the president of the united states on the radio get your bleep down here. and air force one showed up the next morning and the buses started showing up at least at the super dome. some of what i wanted to do in this book is a corrective of sorts. the things are moving so fast that impressions last that often are not accurate. i think maybe the best compliments i have gotten on this book so far were i thought i knew the katrina story both from locals and people outside of new orleans but i didn't. president bush, those first

days, the failures of the president and his white house were near criminal. they just botched the recovery and moved slowly. you had the head of homeland security who was over fema thursday on npr saying i don't think there are people at convention centers. the average people at home watching cable knows more than the man in charge. people started showing up at the convention center on tuesday. it was never meant to be a refuge so nagin had to send the police to break in. with that said, i give the president pretty good parks on the recovery. he is fighting his republican allies and gave a lot more money than the republican allies wanted to do. a cynic could say he had a big

problem on his hand but for credit you cannot blame so little happening at the president's door stop. i think he did a pretty good job on the recovery. kathleen blanco in the days leading up to the katrina she was the only one who took this seriously declaring an emergency before the governor of mississippi and two days before the mayor and the two days before the president. that week after katrina creamed her. she was seen as somebody not up to the task. i think she became one of the goats. with that said, i do put the the

credit for that. she based it on the appraised value of someone's home with the cost of rebuilding. i think we know a home in a black community is valued and sells for less especially in this city where the high ground is taken. a home in the 7th ward, black

working class neighborhood, $50 a square foot and it cost $110 square foot to rebuild your home. you get $100,000 check but it is $180,000 to build. in lake view, the same home valued at $250,000 and they would have enough money because the formula is based on appraisal that left so many african-americans shorts. two thirds of the houses ruined by the flooding sold for under $125,000 but it would cost a lot more than that $125,000 to rebuild. i also want to take, and i am a little scared to bring this up. the whole shrink the footprint and greendot debate. i was there. it is pretty much misunderstood.

for those who don't know, it is the death sentence essentially that neighboreds thought they were getting. the irving institute came in november and there are areas too low lying and shouldn't be rebuilt. they didn't name neighborhoods but they through this map up of new orleans it was an elevation map. you can think of it as blood. northeast bright red and so on and they are not telling you what neighborhoods you cannot rebuilt. the truth is the man who presented the actual plan never said that. some understood he is a white man in a majority black city and you are not coming back if you

declare this. if all of the neighborhoods in red didn't come back, one study said 80% of african-americans in new orleans would be in a community that got a death sentence. he has this whole plan that was just so impractical. forget practical in new orleans where people are not planning months or years ahead but unpractical for human beings everywhere with his idea of arming every community with the facts. they will see the same elevation maps and use $6-$8 million in government money to arm them with experts that will help them see which parts of my community can come back and which are too low lying. the times did great work but

this wasn't one of their best. they take a famous map, and put it on the cover and it says four months to decide and there is a map of the city of new orleans and big green dots over the neighborhoods and not lake view and i will tell you why. big green dots. what they did is take this one map from the study. from the report. and they used that and the planners who were helping joe were saying that hey there are two great parks in new orleans. city park and audubon park. you could turn some of the city into green space. it would be park land.

they put dotted circles around communities they thought were low lying and maybe turn parts into the green space with more park land. the fact you can take the subtle dotted lines with the big green dots on top really scared people here. i can't really totally explain this but i work for "the new york times" and you can make assumpti assumpti assumpti assumptions about politics and you are not wrong. a personal friend to george bush. had karl rove's phone number. very conservative politically. i got it this guy was going to be in the middle. mogul in the middle.

a healthy real estate developer. and my cellphone rings the morning the story appeared really early and trust me when i tell you when you are journalist and you write about someone in sell phone ways it is not good news usually. so how are you doing? i i am bracing for what am i going to hear. i just got off the phone with karl rove and the two of us were saying imagine a guy from "the new york times" treating me fair. anything you want, you got. it is surveillance transparency act and a group of 20 people he created to help him come up with

a plan are meeting in a beautiful office, marble and 16th-17th century religious art, and urns you bump over and you are like did that just cost a $1,000? and you have a plan that says somebody says at 5:00 we will not forbid people from rebuilding but are we going to give them a city permit and everybody threw up their hands and joe said i have dinner planned and need to see my wife. it was like are you going to give the permit? that was a big issue and the most controversial thing they did. they decided to ban it. the mayor didn't take that piece of the recommendation. the next day, sunday, he wants me to meet his wife and it is me, joe canazaro, his wife and his pastor in his car driving to

his favorite italian restaurant in the suburbs. he said that was really interesting about the permits. what would you do? and i am thinking okay, i am born in new york, i love in san francisco, when i arrived in new orleans a week after the storm, i had a tourist knowledge of new orleans. i had somebody impressed with himself because he no longer went to bourbon street and understood there was a mari ska skare -- marigany. the next day it was like the city is in trouble. this isn't a very good plan. i am going to read about the my inter interactions with joe. i am looking forward to

questions from the new orleans audience so i want to leave time. but i want to read one last passage. just to set it up, it is complicated and this was 2/3rds black at the time. you had the old mederie, this home waws was flooded. you had lake view. high class homes destroyed. it wasn't an equal opportunity in the storm in terms of if you were a black home owner you were three times more likely to lose your home. it hasn't been an equal opportunity recovery. i mentioned before the shadow government is doing what they can to thwart low income people

from coming back. the big four public housing projects here there was water damage but many of the buildings had no water damage but they were surrounded by fencing, barb wire put up and never permitted to come back. a way of thwarting the working poor, the kitchen workers at the hotel, the camber maids at the hotel. there was never a plan for bringing people back. one thing about fema is they send people around, give you a one-way ticket and put you in a hotel. but there was never a plan to bring new orleans back. 54% of people were renters at the time. almost all of the money went to help homeowners. there was never much of any help

for renters. five years after katrina, a federal judge ruled it was racially discrimination and there was only 150 million of the $10 billion left and a few extra was thrown in with mary l landreu deserves credit for that. the african-american communities were suffering. i will read this and then take questions. i want to talk about alvin mcdonald, the ceo and president of liberty bank, the six largest black-owned bank in the country. they were devastated. their base was in the eastern half of the city which is to say half of the city is covered in water and the other half communities were flooded but not the entire half of the city. branches were flooded or looted.

the head quarters were ruined. his records, his computer, 80% of the customer base lost their home. the collateral and homes used against the home loans he made. i meet him 11 days after katrina. i got together with him 20 times over the last years. i don't know why it isn't sticking. i would just use him just to both talk about a single business trying to rebuild. he is a significant figure here in new orleans. so that gave me a parascope in the planning . i had a really hard experience of being with several people as they saw their homes for the first time after it had flooded. with all of the mcdonald i tell the story of someone seeing their flooded home through him.

if there is a protaginist of one main character in the book it is him. this is a passage from 2010. almost five years after katrina. all of the mcdonalds grim survey of new orleans east began in a large board room down the rawl. five years after katrina on the sixth floor of the bank head quarters the flood seemed like it happened 12 months earlier. the east facing stretches looked out on to the empty area that was a mall where stores used to be. reed boulevard the next exit up the highway was lonely. he pointed out a building the same height called the methodist hospital. the hospital next door was borded up as was an office tower

that was once filled with black doctors. a pair of large empty parcels on the other side of i-10. the former site of a wal-mart and sams were giant wounds on the landscape. the building next door was shattered and mcdonald pointed out several buildings that were empty. before katrina, more than a dozen were open and he is still the only one. five years later his building sits half empty. he continued the tour behind the battered sedan. a trio of strip malls that were all occupied before katrina and now all vacant. an abandoned nursing home and a building covered in graffiti. stretches of boarded up strip

malls and destroyed business. a days inn and comfort suites opened up but two other hotels slashed prices and reopened. several car dealers, gas stations and a few place do is grab food. we have no jobs, no commercial business to speak up. mcdonald occasionally left a mean artery to dip into a subdivision. lake forest estate, mcdonald's old neighborhood, and another neighborhood were littered with ruined homes on the street. most communities were not even 1/3rd back. the jack learntan affect. prior to new orleans, it was home to four facatholic --

katrina -- and now only one. mcdonald headed into the seventh war and then to jen tilly. if anything the seventh war had more shuttered businesses and more wrecked homes sporting the national guard's katrina tattoo. mcdonald passed to jen tilly and showed off the half wrecked building he bought under a program created to encourage investment in blighted neighborhoods and plans to turn it into a professional building. he bought a wrecked mini mall saying at least there is life back here. so i want to welcome you all to ask questions. they are asking if you had questions to walk up to the mike if you would not mind. anyone? i was so comprehensive there

want possibly be a question possibly. >> in your opening, you mentioned the key players, bush, nagin -- nagen -- and i didn't here you mention bobby jindel who covered the lake view and lake front area. being from lake view, we all felt for a long time his absence and that the first congressional district was the hardest hit district in all of the 9,000 square miles of area affected by it. i was wondering did you cross this path or recall interaction

with the congress man. thank you. >> she is asking about bobby jindel, who of course is running for president. he just lost for governor in 2003 and won in 2007 two years after katrina. it is interesting to note blanco who bet him in 2003 won by about 50,000 votes. in the 2007 election, 60,000 less blacks voted in that election than had in 2003 given the field to governor jindel. the only way i felt back then bobby jindel -- i will give the louisiana congressional delegation credit. they spoke as one voice. didn't matter if it was bill jefferson, black democrat, or bobby jindel, very active, they

got mind any plan that would help bring more money to new orleans. i will be honest with you, though. i don't know of his appearance or lack of appearance. but i know in lake view they were resentful about ray nagen. on the surveillance transparency act night before surveillance transparency act -- saturday night before it happened, they were out to eat at the steak knife. it is like you have kathleen blanco living in a bunker in the emergency operation center in b baton rouge. you know what nagin did? spent the afternoon five hours because we had a big part as believe it or not a corrupt

mayor. he is not sitting in a federal prison serving a ten year sentence for misconduct in office. he spent five hours on a movie studio where blanco and others know there is a horrific category four at the point, about to be category five, and the head of the national hurricane center calls, dr. max mayfield, the head of the hurricane center doesn't call politicians but he wanted to scare the governor of new orleans like you have to do something here. he is in wake field, and you know, he is up in the chopper a few days after katrina and goes to the 17th street canal, the canal where the wall fell and flood lake view and other parts of the city. he understood lake view. he barely showed up there, though. if i remember he made one appearance.

it was strange he wasn't there. the extraordinary things about new orleans after katrina whether it be lake view, the lower ninth war, it is the same story. people didn't wait. in lake view they went to a church and recreational room and started saying i don't know where the government is or the mayor but what can we do to start taking steps to rebuild. the lower ninth war they went to the sanchez community center and it stunk and was moldy and same thing. putting up a map of the lower ninth war and said put a post-it up if you plan to come back. you had to wait for the fema map. it took almost a year to come up the maps of can i rebuild and do

i lift the house three feet or ten feet. is there going to be a school in my neighborhood? everything depended on everything else and a lot of people don't deal but others got in and started doing despiidiss- despite it all. connie? ...

. >> 50,000 resident have come through my center. where there was waters, there was injustice. every class of people. it didn't discriminate me to do injustice. but i keep hearing the same injustices, and i think it's wrong. i would like to know what your take is on that. >> you know, it's a complicated one. i have a little advantage. i can tell in book form. i spent ten years as opposed reporters parachuting in and

televisions, exceptions c-span. they're looking for the simple narrative. the simple narrative is that there were wealthy whites and poor blacks, stand in for the low-income community. i talk about -- it's very important. it's just one story. there was this fixation. i almost took it as a challenge. i talk in my book. what about the black middle class. 96,000 people that's 1/fifth the population. i think that's the shame of it all that, you know, it was past ten years and the media is finishing the narrative. they did at that point.

i also think, it's kind of a thing that requires, there's two stories here. if you were here -- i was here for eight months, if you were here you didn't know if you were going to come back. it was possible that it was going to turn into a disneyland. big hotels, uptown royals, st. charles, the garden district but it wasn't clear about the black middle class, it wasn't clear about the white middle

class, the young urban recovery professional. [laughs] >> they came months and volunteered and fell in love with new orleans. hey, this is a pretty cool place to live, relative to a book -- brooklyn or san francisco, it's pretty cheaper to live. culture. you can buy a house 100, 150,000 early on. it's beginning of a start-up scene. the community is being remade. it's a complicated thing. to me it's ground zero. a home, 80, a thousand here. all of the people have been

priced out. people who eight, six years after the storm had this idea that at some point i'm going to move out. there's tension, and also i think what the media is seeing and i'm talking about this myself, if you look at the eastern half of the city, it's a long, long way to recovery. i was talking about the five-year mark. it was doing better than it was back then, but there's still empty office buildings and abandoned strip malls. section a voucher housing. it's 80% back. i would say that it's better than it was before katrina. there's always new stuff, new houses. >> younger. >> younger. you can remake the house. the whole city went through that

experience. the old theater downtown, it's beautiful, it's amazing. there is an advantage to having all that money washing through. but you know, you go through -- black working class community, 60% back. they didn't have the wealth in their family. you go to park in historic black middle class community. it had home ownership, a mixed race community, three quarters of african american. a resident there. famous actor called it the black

mel -- melburry. it is shocking and you go blocks without seeing a house. empty lots and overgrown weeds. you don't have to go to just this small black piece. it's one of the wealthiest communities of the city. you used to have a golf course. something like that. i think the race element -- there really is a lot of pain in the eastern half of the city. >> yeah, i totally agree. thank you for recognizing that. i think, you know, 70% minority.

i feel the resentment. what about us? new orleans east. what about us? we are finding a way to come back. you know, very little house and injustices and all that. so thank you. >> thank you. yeah. >> okay. >> thank you. >> prekatrina -- [laughs] [inaudible] >> it's funny i was just telling, sort of asking you about school reform. before katrina, new orleans had

legendary problems, crime, corruption. i don't know if you can call it the worst system in the country but a really bad school system. we can now remake it. there's one issue in this book that we feel like i kind of -- i just want it straight down the middle. it's just so complicated, anything to change the system is terrific. so much confusion, rolling stone. katrina kids. 18, 12. what they've gone through. they saw the government didn't care, largely african-american. what imfact did they have on them having through walk through the water and they all talked about the schools, and the thing about the school reform, cliché,

those first years were so traumatic, everything was changing, schools were closed, parish district fired every teacher. so many inexperiences teachers who weren't prepared to deal with the traumatized kids. these kids were traumatized at the age eight, ten. so i just feel four to eight years what people know is stability, neighborhood school, my kids were going before katrina and now -- that wasn't the reality. all charter schools and kids are going across the city and other places. on the other hand, the schools were finally the right direction. first until recently the

criticism of the charter schools whether they were cherry picking anyone with a problem, anyone that would be a challenge and would hurt the scores wasn't accepted. the greatest numbers of kids expelled in the country were in orleans parish. they wanted to make sure the numbers were good. that changed a lot. there was a lawsuit that you had to take care of special needs students. the schools started to change traumatically. i know we pay too much attention to scores. i don't know as an outsider how to compare. that's the great thing. the thing that i wander about and i know this is a recentment in the african community here,

october, november of 2005, we're now august of 2015, no schools have been returned. there is elected school board in charge of what ten schools give or take. you know, so that's my question. okay the system is now has been writed. you're not trusting us with our schools. that's a place where i kind of landed, largely this has been for the better, but what about local control. it's time to get back to the schools of new orleans. you get your representatives are. any questions? okay. well, thank you very much. [applause] >> i appreciate.

>> i'm happy to sign any books if you want me to sign a book. okay. >> book tv is on twitter and facebook. and we want to hear from you. tweet us twitter.com or facebook.com/booktv. >> katherine reports on life on the settlement, science and technology writer estevan johnson recalls outbreak in london in 1854 in the book the ghost map.

also the new yorkers reports on relationship between humans and laws of spicies. overconsumption affects the economy, and personal well-being in the book of stuff. what happens to the tons of trash that the average american produces in a lifetime. books at the university of california. >> on saturday september 5th live from thenation's capitol. former second lady and senior fellow lynn cheney, book tv and c-span2.

television for serious readers. >> here is a look at the current best selling nonfiction books. topping the list national correspondent for the atlanta magazine, between the world and me, former president jimmy carter reflects on his life and political career in a full life. also on the post list h is for hawk by hell -- helen mcdonald and being mortal, and then what if, randal manroe. nonfiction best sellers according to to the denver post. many of the authors have or will be appearing on book tv. you can watch them on our website at