Source: Booklist

In the latest issue of Booklist:

Cyril Crutchfield Jr. was the football coach at Port Sulphur High School in Louisiana’s Plaquemines Parish when Katrina hit. His team had won the state’s small school championship in 2002 and was ready to make a run again when the hurricane arrived, scattering players and coaches across the state and the country in order to survive. When Crutchfield was a head coach again, it was 2006, and his team was the South Plaquemines High Hurricanes, a consolidation of several smaller schools that were destroyed by Katrina. Longman, a sportswriter for the New York Times and a Louisiana native, follows the team throughout the 2007 season. He establishes a sense of place early on, which is crucial to understand why people would return to a place that seemed doomed to poverty and the vicissitudes of mother nature. Interviews with players, coaches, parents, relatives, and ordinary townsfolk round out a moving and often-inspirational examination of one team’s (and, by extension, one community’s) refusal to disappear.

The book, The Hurricanes: One High School's Homecoming After Katrina by Jere Longman, is available now.