In his preface, Cedric Johnson states that this is “a book about disaster” (p. vii). And it is. But what is unique and powerful about this text is that while the destruction wrought by Hurricane Katrina is not minimized here, the storm is shown to be the lesser of two disasters that have ravaged New Orleans. This second and more far-reaching destructive force is neoliberalism, and the toll it has taken on New Orleans and on US cities more generally over the past several decades has been more insidious, but decidedly no less damaging, than any “natural” catastrophe. The Neoliberal Deluge uses the spectacle, debacle, and tragedy of Hurricane Katrina to examine how neoliberalism in practice—neoliberalism on the ground—shapes how we ask questions about and find answers to urban problems.

The book's main strength is the various perspectives it brings to bear on the problem of neoliberalism generally and on Katrina specifically. At least eight academic disciplines are represented over 12 chapters, and many of the authors hail from interdisciplinary programs (e.g. science and technology studies, media studies, African American studies). Seeing Katrina's devastation through such varied frames is perhaps the only way to appreciate its impact. Katrina was, as Eric Ishiwata describes in Chapter 2, less a meteorological phenomenon than “a disruptive event” that conferred sudden and meaningful political agency on actors normally positioned outside the bounds of politics as usual (pp. 34–35); it is no wonder that multiple lenses are required to see those who were previously rendered invisible in the order of things.

This strength suggests something about individual disciplines, too: that perhaps many problems are too big, too multifaceted, and too important to be approached using only a single kind of academic expertise. As Avis Jones-Deweever says about the storm: “There is no panoramic lens wide enough, no plasma television large enough, and, frankly, no language vivid enough to adequately relay the storm's level of devastation” (p. 305)—to say nothing of the still larger issue of neoliberalism. What is “neoliberalism,” after all? From the authors who describe it here, it appears in a depressingly extensive array of forms: as a particular relationship between the state and the market or between the individual and society; as a way of making decisions about public policy; as a vocabulary; as a mode of citizenship; as a way to frame news coverage; as a set of choices pertaining to housing, health, and the environment; and as a series of both inclusions and omissions that together somehow constitute our contemporary milieu. Neoliberalism is, for want of a better phrase, a way of life; as an ethos, it shapes our consciousness to such an extent that it is often difficult to tell if there are any aspects of our lives somehow not bound by its strictures. To somehow capture both the magnitude of the storm and the pervasiveness of neoliberalism requires myriad approaches and voices.

The book demonstrates this best in the moments when it is able to contrast neoliberalism with its opposite, or its absence. In an illuminating chapter, editor Johnson eloquently describes one of the most high-profile responses to Katrina: Brad Pitt's Make It Right (MIR) Foundation. Pitt's earnest effort to rebuild the Lower Ninth Ward with 150 environmentally sound urban homes earned him widespread praise for his personal commitment and architectural accolades for the forward-thinking designs he chose, and Johnson gives credit where due for MIR's eco-conscious approach to home building. One is hard-pressed to criticize what is surely a significant attempt to help those displaced by the storm. But as Johnson carefully argues, for all its good intentions, MIR has never strayed from a fairly narrowly defined neoliberal agenda. In its attempt to remake the city, MIR has privileged personal architectural choices over holistic urban planning, championed private (and privatized) solutions over political advocacy, and focused consistently on technological fixes over contesting deep-seated economic and political problems.

These choices have real, material, and potentially devastating consequences that are not alleviated simply by adding design features. For example, Johnson takes MIR to task for its new urbanist fascination with front porch living. In his words (pp. 213–14):

Johnson's work here allows us to problematize even the best intentions, and to see quite clearly what is not present in most conversations about rebuilding New Orleans.

In another example of defining neoliberalism by way of distinction, co-authors Chris Russill and Chad Lavin show how our dominant narratives about Kartrina's widespread devastation most often refuse to acknowledge what sociologist Eric Klinenberg calls the “political economy of disaster vulnerability,” or what one commenter more starkly describes as “murder by public policy” (pp. 12–13). In other words, there was nothing particularly “natural” about how Katrina differentially impacted people according to their race, gender, and economic class; instead, mortality rates in this and other disasters are the result of decisions made decades ago that manifest themselves in contemporary inequalities: zoning policies and building codes, and city planning decisions that affect access to employment, health care, and transportation. None of these elements allows one to point to a single villainous official or a rogue agency that failed to fulfill its charge; instead, this sort of complex structural analysis stands in stark contrast to the neoliberal desire to assign responsibility to a single actor or actors. Moreover, during Katrina and its aftermath, the search to find “a” villain was most often manifested in a single narrative from both the left and the right: specifically, the state's failure to respond to the crisis. This frame—found in both mainstream and “alternative” media accounts—teaches the profoundly neoliberal lesson that one should distrust government, while it reinforces the very features of privatization that continue to create and reproduce citizens' vulnerability to devastating events (p. 22).

In her chapter “The Forgotten Ones,” Avis Jones-Deweever points out that while we became—at least temporarily—attuned to issues of race and class in the United States thanks to the disruptive force of the hurricane, gender issues have remained largely submerged and ignored as we have analyzed the causes and consequences of the disaster. Gendered expectations about who is responsible for the well-being of elderly parents, small children, and the very ill, as well as who does the caretaking work of attending to the traumatized after any catastrophe, have gone unquestioned in Katrina's wake; the fact of women's particular vulnerabilities during times of crisis has been largely unexamined. Jones-Deweever gives voice to “the forgotten ones” by interviewing women from the Gulf Coast who served their communities in many different capacities before and after the storm, and their accounts are harrowing, powerful, and necessary for any meaningful conversation about disaster prevention and relief.

While the book's contribution is significant, the text is not without fault. Johnson's introduction is ambitious and therefore somewhat unfocused. For example, in just over six pages, it attempts to cover the entirety of the complicated geopolitical and economic history of New Orleans. The intent may be admirable—to demonstrate how the city's peculiar geography has been, from the outset, man-made and in flux—but the chronology is not well thematized, and a casual reader may lose interest, or lose the overarching point. And although Johnson goes on to dutifully describe each chapter, as editors are wont to do, his account does not aid the reader in making sense of them together or as a whole. Perhaps letting each chapter speak for itself—each offering a new angle on the problem—was a conscious editorial choice, but the effect leaves the reader a bit adrift.

Approaching neoliberalism from these very different vantage points is, perhaps, the only honest way to understand the phenomenon. The book's multidisciplinary approach, however, also suggests something about political science, and its often marked inability to describe something as amorphous—and yet as influential—as a way of life. As a discipline so strongly shaped by behavioralism—particular activities, and individual behaviors that may be aggregated but somehow never cumulative, never more than the sum of their parts—political science is not particularly well equipped to discuss the shape of things beyond the immediate, specific, and material circumstances of political life. Rational choice theory only continues this predisposition toward methodological individualism. It is easy to understand why such frameworks are appealing and even necessary for political science, as such, to flourish: They allow us to point to amassing data and expanding knowledge, and to deploy these tools for predictive purposes as part of the justification for our discipline's institutional existence. But The Neoliberal Deluge also suggests, if only implicitly, that these methodological choices may themselves be symptomatic of our neoliberal milieu. If that is the case, then political science may have something of a “fish in the water” problem, unable to see or know the conditions of its own existence.