Through faces drawn and words written come the trials and tribulations, first-hand, of those who withstood the hurricanes, the ensuing chaos, repression and tyranny and stood their ground, of those who evacuated by choice, by necessity or by compulsion at authoritarian gunpoint and then came back, making it their cause or life's work to reclaim and rebuild. Hope, or at least resilience, stubbornly underlies or emerges outright in so many of these pages of anecdotes, revealing so many hearts and minds of North America's gulf region, which still lies in danger of coastal erosion and global warming.