Ahead of World Book Day on 23 April, I've been reading a lot about Hurricane Katrina.

Some of the best accounts I've come across of the storms that ripped into the U.S. Gulf coast in August 2005 have been in the fiction of James Lee Burke. His stories in Jesus out to Sea and his detective novel The Tin Roof Blowdown are throbbing with anger at the authorities who let more than 1,800 people die and left elderly women, tiny children, hospital patients and chained-up prisoners sweating in tropical heat with no electricty, clean water or food, surrounded by sewage and hostile police.

And they're steepd in grief at the loss of a spectacular city that will never be quite the way it was, because you can't recreate the atmosphere of a place where thousands of people lost their homes and many haven't got good enough reasons to go back.

James Lee Burke's crime fiction has the moral ambiguity of real life - not all his police are good, not all lawbreakers are bad. He's outraged at those police - not all, but many - who left their posts and failed to protect the people they were employed to serve. And he makes quietly astute observations about the race and class tensions that were exposed in the hurricane's wake.

It seems particularly appropriate that crime writing should be one of the best ways of getting across the horror of Katrina, because its seems to me that part of the reason so many people were abandoned in the hell that New Orleans became was that they'd already been written out of society as criminals and no-hopers.

People reacted in all sorts of ways during and after the storm that sent vicious winds crashing into an area roughly the size of Britain and submerged 80 percent of New Orleans under 6 to 20 feet (2 to 6 metres) of water. Some people who thought of themselves as gangsters became heroes as they tried to rescue grandmothers and boatloads of children. Others grabbed the opportunities to take what they wanted or needed in a city whose wealthier inhabitants had left.

The range of these experiences comes across in "Voices from the Storm", which tells the real tales of 13 stranded survivors, including a Vietnamese priest, a prisoner who escaped his cell to save his life, and a woman who floated her grandchildren in buckets through miles of filthy floodwater searching for rescuers. It's part of Voice of Witness, an oral history project published by San Francisco-based author Dave Eggers' McSweeney's books. The Katrina book is edited by Lola Vollen, a doctor specialising in the aftermath of large-scale human rights abuses, and Chris Ying, a San Fransciso-based writer.

Another book in the same series is coming out very soon about undocumented workers in the United States, and some of its most striking stories involve Latino workers after Katrina. I'd read a little bit already about how numbers of Hispanic students in New Orleans schools had risen by 3 to 12 percent, while black and white school enrollment was still below pre-Katrina levels.

But it all gets even clearer when I read "Underground America", due out in early May, edited by asylum lawyer and fiction writer Peter Orner. Some of the people interviewed for the book were already working in Louisiana or Mississippi, and told by their employers not to evacuate. Others were taken there for the clean-up operation, crammed into rooms and trailers and set to work back-to-back 12-hour days for well below the minimum wage.

And then, in an almost unimaginable twist of injustice as the job came to an end, bosses set authorities on them for being in the country illegally or just slipped away without paying up. Voice of Witness managing editor Chris Ying has a blog about it on the Huffington Post.

Immigrant Latinos removed more than 80 percent of the debris from Hurricane Katrina, according to an estimate published in American Anthropology journal.

Many of the 100,000 Latino workers who relocated to the Gulf Coast after Katrina were in the country legally, of course, but one in three of the undocumented reconstruction workers reported trouble getting paid for their work, a study by the Human Rights Centre at University of California at Berkeley found.

A month after the disaster - one of the worst in American history - U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement said it sent 725 officers to the Gulf to detain and remove undocumented workers.

Another person who's telling the story of Katrina and what's happened since is comedian-writer-radio host Harry Shearer. Like everyone who's close to New Orleans, he's angry too - not just at officials, but at outsider journalists who continue to get their facts wrong. So I'll stop here, and pass you over to him.

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