Ian McNulty’s eye for detail makes A Season of Night important. He recorded the little things that we all experienced but never thought they were more than trivialities. We all felt and talked about the darkness and the quiet in our neighborhoods and the joy we felt when experiencing everyday normal activities. I remember delivering OffBeat magazines to Molly’s at the Market two weeks after the storm—a very mundane usually occurrence—and getting a standing ovation from the bar patrons. McNulty, who wrote for OffBeat before Katrina, takes readers along to witness simple events of returning to a ruined city and all the challenges it presented with insight and charm—highlighting, for me, an accurate picture of the emotional aftermath that the failed levees wrought.

Every Katrina survivor will find in McNulty’s book a similar experience, making the book feel very personal, as if he was telling your story, not his. How many of us remember feeling thrilled to find our neighbor had returned? As McNulty writes, “I overheard one woman tell another on the street, her voice rasping with emotion, ‘I’m so glad to be back home, I’m even happy to see people I hate.’” Probably the best Katrina book I’ve read.