Congratulations to Bruce S. Snow for a Tremendous Review in Arkansas Review

Thank you to Arkansas Review: A Journal of Delta Studies and reviewer Stan Weeber for an outstanding review of Bruce S. Snow's Can Everybody Swim? A Survival Story from Katrina's Superdome

"Legendary sociologist Kai T. Erickson predicted that Hurricane Katrina would be the most studied disaster in U.S. history. It may also be one of the most storied. Voluminous archives of Katrina survivor stories are now tucked away in university libraries, oral history projects, social media sites, and in films, books, newspapers, journals, and magazines worldwide for historians to peruse. Standing tall above these documented accounts is Bruce Snow’s Can Everybody Swim? which could someday gain fame as the most richly detailed and complete account of the human misery at the Louisiana Superdome in late August and early September 2005."  ~ Stan Weeber, Arkansas Review 48.3 (December 2017). 

 

 

Congratulations, Bruce! We are humbled and grateful that you chose Et Alia as your publisher. 

Harvey's Destruction on the Eve of Katrina

Et Alia Press is holding our southeast Texas neighbors in our thoughts.

Hurricane Harvey’s intensity and destruction are all too familiar to Bruce Snow. On the eve of Hurricane Katrina’s landfall twelve years ago—Sunday, August 28, 2005—Bruce, his ill mother, uncle, uncle’s wife, and dog awaited Katrina in horror. A shortage of cash combined with a fierce loyalty to protect the Gentilly neighborhood family home purchased by his Ecuadorian immigrant grandparents led the then twenty-five-year-old author and his family to remain in their City to weather the storm, including enduring six days in the infamous Superdome.

About this day twelve years ago, Bruce writes,

“Satellite images of the multicolored, vicious swirl overlying the entire Gulf Coast were in my peripheral vision, but I wasn’t paying much attention. The sun filtering through the Venetian blinds of my grandparents’ home began to fade. It would be the last sunset of my old life. . . .  I wandered my block in a catatonic stupor, nothing moving around me but the gentle breeze. Everyone was gone. Not just my friends, but everyone. The City had been emptied, and we were all alone. Our home, just a tiny island of light in the silent metropolis.”

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