Hurricane Season: A Coach, His Team, and Their Triumph in the Time of Katrina
By: Neal Thompson / Narrated By: David Drummond
Length: 10 hrs and 43 mins
Audio production glitches can’t keep a good story down!
And I mean glitches like CRAZY! About drove me up the wall until I caught the rhythm of every other paragraph sounding like narrator David Drummond was in an empty closet… Normally, such production flaws would be enough to do me in on an audiobook, but the fact that Hurricane Season was about Hurricane Katrina (An event important to me) and about football (Okay so, like: Baseball? Nooo! Football? Yesss!). I dunno if it’s cuz I once worked on a boys’ dorm with male staff and ALL that they and the students watched WAS football, but I kinda sorta like the sport.
So the two together? I’m THERE!
This was the third time I’ve listened to the audiobook and while I left a review over on Audible praising it to high-heaven, this time around I’ve gotta admit that there were a few things about it that left me less than absolutely enraptured.
While the book opens with a near-death episode that one of the students experienced as Katrina made landfall, it goes on to give us the history of the John Curtis Christian School and of the Curtis family. Like a lot of history. Wait, I mean: a LOT!!! I don’t know if it’s cuz I’ve heard that history three times now, but I felt like the book dragged a bit. Then too there’s a LOT about the Curtis family and what they did in the time before getting the school reopened earlier than most schools in and around New Orleans could. I mean, it was interesting, but I REALLY wish there’d been more about what the students did and what their lives were like. EVERYthing is important to a teenager—I mean, teenagers as a life-form are completely self-absorbed, so it would’ve been interesting and wonderful to hear and feel the emotions they felt as they were completely uprooted. (One verrrry interesting bit: Ya know that iconic photo of the tanker that broke through the levee and it is squashing a yellow school bus? Turns out that bus was known to one of the students.. The family looks on Google Earth to find their home’s been decimated, and there? What’s that? It’s the bus Mom drives?!?)
So yeah yeah yeah, I’m whining about the dragging bit, but actually this is a fanTASTic story. Each of the Patriots’s football games is gone into mightily, almost play-by-play, to the point where I rather felt bad for the players whose mistakes were spoken of and forever chronicled in history (EsPECially the quarterback, poor Kyle!). But like I said, I like football, so it was like listening to a game unfold on the radio. What’s not to love.
Then too, I reeeeally liked the Curtis family. They’re a group of people who LIVE their faith rather than just talk it. I LOVED how they took in some of the players, offered to let them move in so that families could get back on their feet, not having to worry about the care for a son. Some of the players worried about being a Black kid living with a White family, but their love and respect for each of their coaches made such an idea quite tolerable indeed. EVERYbody was considered family. I love stories about generous people with good hearts and open homes!
A seriously good book, but poor David Drummond’s narration (That empty closet!) might drive ya nuts. But hang in there: The story’s worth it!
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