The New York Daily News profiles cartoonist Josh Neufeld, focusing on his self-published book, Katrina Came Calling: A Gulf Coast Deployment, composed largely of blog entries written while he was volunteering in Mississippi after the hurricane:

Like many of us who watched as Hurricane Katrina tried to wipe New Orleans and the Gulf Coast regions of three states off the planet last summer, Neufeld wanted to do something. He read how the Red Cross turned Haspiel’s mother down as a volunteer because she had no training, and decided, “I had no skills either, but if this 60-year-old woman could do it, I could do it too.”

Four weeks of training later, Neufeld was shipped out to Biloxi, Miss., living in warehouse barracks and working 12- to 16-hour days on a three-person truck delivering hundreds of meals to families around the region each day.

Thanks to a trusty laptop computer kept in a backpack he carried everywhere (“People probably thought of me as this weird, nerdy guy with the computer,” he grinned), a digital camera and a most-times iffy wireless Internet connection at the barracks, Neufeld was able to keep a running chronicle of the events of his day on his blog.

You can read an excerpt of the book on Neufeld’s Livejournal.

This entry was posted on Friday, June 23rd, 2006 at 8:58 am and is filed under Books, Creators, Independent. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.