Summary Of Michael Lewis Wading Toward Home

Michael Lewis is a best-selling nonfiction author and an investigate journalist. His work examines success, innovation, and the financial world. The following is an excerpt Wading toward Home from a longer feature he wrote about Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans for the New York Times. Michael Lewis dispels the myths about the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina and shows rich and poor feared each other.

After Hurricane Katrina, New Orleans people divided into two groups rich and poor. As Michael Lewis mentioned in his excerpt Wading toward Home “Pretty quickly, it become clear that there were more than a few people left in the city and that they fell into two broad categories: extremely well-armed white men prepared to do battle and ragtag collection of irregulars, black and white, who had no idea that there was any one to do battle with.” Geographically, New Orleans people organized themselves into two separate groups: rich people who stayed in Uptown and the Garden District, and the poor people who evacuated from the city to the downtown and Superdome.

The rich people who stayed behind and did not evacuate armed themselves, and they were afraid of the poor people.

They assumed that the poor people would attack them. Having electricity and working TV sets, the rich people were getting false and misleading information from media and local government. Watching some terrifying and repeated clips from convention center, and the Superdome on the TV, the rich people were even more frighten to death. Even though the rich and white people thought that they would be looted or killed, nobody from poor people destroyed their belongings and hurt them. As Michael Lewis reported “there was not a house in the Garden District, or Uptown, that could not have been easily entered; there was not a house in either area that didn’t have food and water to keep a family of five alive for a week; and there was hardly a house in either place that had been violated in any

way.”
Similarly, the poor people had a same fear as a rich people; they presumed that the Hurricane Katrina was not a natural disaster, but it was a man made tragedy that fabricated by the rich people and the government trying to demolish them. Inside the Superdome and convention center, the media was making false accusations toward the poor black men and spread out rumors. When the poor people were struggling for shortage of food and water in downtown New Orleans, there were plenty in a few miles away. Because they were afraid of rich people, the poor people did not leave their places to search for food, water, and shelter.
Michael Lewis has eliminated the misconception about the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, and he explained how the rich and poor feared each other. Creating the fear, suspicion, and the tension between rich and poor, the media played a big role.