We Hold Our Breath, Micah Fields
We Hold Our Breath, Micah Fields
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We Hold Our Breath
A Journey to Texas Between Storms

Author: Micah Fields

Narrator: Micah Fields

Unabridged: 4 hr 41 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Publisher: Tantor Media

Published: 06/20/2023


Synopsis

Developed as the commercial hub of the Texas cotton and sugarcane industries, Houston was designed for profit, not stability. Its first residents razed swamplands into submission to construct a maze of highways and suburbs, giving the city a sprawling, centerless energy as storms and floods rattled coastal Texas.

When Hurricane Harvey made landfall in 2017, Fields set off from his home in Iowa back to the battered city of his childhood to rescue his mother. Fields tracks the devastation of Hurricane Harvey, one storm in a long lineage that threatens the fourth largest city in America.

Fields depicts the history of Houston with reverence and lyrical certainty, investigating the conflicting facets of Texan identity that are steeped in racial subjugation, environmental collapse, and capitalist greed. He writes of the development of the modern city in the wake of the destruction of Galveston in 1900; of the oil booms and busts that shaped the city; of the unchecked lust for growth that makes Houston so expressive of the American dream.

We Hold Our Breath is a portrait of a city that exists despite it all, a city whose story has always been one of war waged relentlessly against water.

About Micah Fields

Micah Fields is a writer, teacher, and fly-fishing guide on the Missouri River. His work has been published in the Oxford American, Gulf Coast, Baffler, Columbia Journalism Review, Field and Stream, and other outlets. He served as a Marine Corps infantry rifleman from 2007 to 2011 and is a combat veteran of deployments in Iraq and Afghanistan. He lives in Helena, Montana.


Reviews

Goodreads review by Kerry

I listened to this as an audiobook and the subject was very well suited to that media. The chapters cover different aspects of the recent flooding in Harris County Texas. Basically the area is a swamp that has been over developed so the southern part of the county floods. It flooded during Hurricane......more

Goodreads review by Hannah

Really loved this one. I was exceptionally lucky that the only impact Hurricane Harvey had on me was lots of Internet for three weeks. Learning about how it affected others from a forest had account was illuminating. So was all the history the author wove in as told by his family and informed by his......more

Goodreads review by Bailey

This book was truly fascinating! It was educational in the most interesting way! I loved learning about the history Houston. I appreciate that this author included the good and the bad. He did a wonderful job acknowledging not only the history, but the culture, individual impact, landscape, etc. I w......more

Goodreads review by Philip

I’ve been waiting for a good Harvey/Houston book. Well worth a read for anyone who grew up in Houston or wants an insight into the city in the swamp.......more