In May 2001, one day after the news broke that Senator Jim Jeffords was leaving the Republican Party, rumors began to spread that Nebraska Senator Ben Nelson was contemplating a move in the opposite direction. The rumors made a certain amount of sense. Nelson was a conservative Democrat and personal friend of President Bush. And Republicans were desperate to reclaim the majority they had just lost. For Nelson, the circumstances were perfect ... to prank-call his press secretary.

In December 2003, Brent Cambron gave himself his first injection of morphine. Save for the fact that he was sticking the needle into his own skin, the motion was familiar--almost rote. Over the course of the previous 17 months, as an anesthesia resident at Boston's Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, Cambron had given hundreds of injections. He would stick a syringe into a glass ampule of fentanyl or morphine or Dilaudid, pulling up the plunger to draw his dose. Then he'd inject the dose into his patient.

Captain Ty Wiltz normally oversees the narcotics division of the Plaquemines Parish Sheriff's Office. But, since Katrina hit, he has been leading a search and rescue team deep into the parish bayou, which begins just south of New Orleans and runs nearly 100 miles to the Gulf of Mexico. "It's a far cry different than searching for dope," he says as the team sets out early Tuesday morning from Belle Chasse High School, which has been turned into a makeshift base for the sheriff's department and a contingent of soldiers from the New Mexico National Guard.

With Hurricane Katrina still over the Gulf of Mexico, Orleans Parish Criminal Sheriff Marlin Gusman, New Orleans's chief jailer, convened his ranking officers for an emergency meeting. Present in the sheriff's conference room that Saturday were most of his wardens, as well as the officer in charge of supplies and the head of the jail's kitchen, a huge feeding operation that prepared more than 18,000 meals per day. The sheriff went around the table, asking the officers if they were prepared for a storm.

I DEAD IN ATTIC
By Chris Rose
(Chris Rose Books, 158 pp., $13)

BREACH OF FAITH: HURRICANE KATRINA AND THE NEAR DEATH OF A
GREAT AMERICAN CITY
By Jed Horne
(Random House, 412 pp., $25.95)

THE STORM
By Ivor van Heerden and Mike Bryan
(Viking, 308 pp., 25.95)

THE GREAT DELUGE: HURRICANE KATRINA, NEW ORLEANS, AND THE
MISSISSIPPI GULF COAST
By Douglas Brinkley
(William Morrow, 716 pp., $29.95)

PATH OF DESTRUCTION: THE DEVASTATION OF NEW ORLEANS AND THE
COMING AGE OF SUPERSTORMS
By John McQuaid and Mark Schleifstein
(Little, Brown, 386 pp., $26)

I

Excuse me for noticing, but haven't we been commemorating Columbus's quincentennial in the wrong year? I know that dates and math aren't America's strong suit right now, but it doesn't take advanced calculus to figure that 1492 plus 500 equals 1992.

Where were you when you learned about the fall of the Wall? Me, I was in a grubby, dimly lit roadside police station in Costa Rica. Having just emerged from two days of shooting rapids on a rubber raft through jungle mountains, followed by a morning at a remote, coconut-covered beach on the Atlantic coast where the sand and the inhabitants alike are mostly black and mostly untroubled, I was out of touch with everything except the elements. In the ramshackle port town of Limón I’d stood with two gringo traveling companions on a litter

Moon Palace

by Paul Auster

(Viking, 286 pp., $18.95]

Paul Auster bas been, until just now, the ghost at the banquet of contemporary American letters. Though unquestionably accomplished (in the last decade he has published a memoir, five novels, several collections of poetry, and a major compendium of modern French poetry, which he edited and partly translated), he has been curiously absent from the debates being waged at the far end of the table. There are reasons for this. For one thing, his work does not fit neatly into the currently active slots. While his prose has tended toward stylistic austerity, it has little in common with the water and wafer fare beloved of the minimalists. In the same way, Auster has narrowly escaped the "postmodernist" tag; for all his concern with the slipperiness of perception and identity, his writing has a solid modernist grounding. He has not given up on the idea that art can discover new meaning from experience.