Author of "Breach of Faith" meets incoming LSU Freshmen

From The Daily Reveille at Louisiana State University:

Incoming students were greeted this week by Jed Horne, author of "Breach of Faith: Hurricane Katrina and the Near Death of a Great American City," who told the class of 2011 they have a great opportunity for applied learning through service during the reconstruction of New Orleans, as the two-year anniversary of Hurricane Katrina's landfall on Wednesday approaches.

The author urged students to "Shake yourself alive, study Katrina, make it part of your life, try to understand the deeper politics, try to understand the underlying aesthetics [and] the underlying ethics of life in Katrina. If the book is helpful in this process, terrific. If not, keep reading."

Horne's book was selected as required reading for incoming freshmen for the Summer Reading Program, Friday morning during the Academic Convocation.

Horne commended students at the University and around the nation for their volunteer work in Katrina-effected areas in Louisiana."There were 10,000 students at spring break last year effectively doing the work of a dysfunctional government and at the same time galvanizing the situation to service and teaching a generation about the responsibilities we, as individuals, have," Horne said.

At the same time, the Reveille article also acknowledges the difficulty of getting students engaged in volunteerism, and reported that more faculty than students participated in follow-up discussions about Katrina. For those who had been on-hand during the storm or right after, a kind of Katrina-fatigue can set in. Horne understands this.

"The thing to remember about a disaster - the thing I have to remind myself in moments of great frustration - is by definition a disaster takes time to recover," Horne said.

He encouraged the new freshmen to show leadership and "recognize that your time here coincides with an extraordinary, but deeply troubling, moment in American history."

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