“We Came to Rebuild New Orleans: Stories of the Hurricane Katrina Volunteers” by Christopher E. Manning, LSU Press, 308 pages, and “Rebuilding New Orleans: Immigrant Laborers and Street Food Vendors in the Post-Katrina Era” by Sarah Fouts, the University of North Carolina Press, 216 pages.

Soon after Hurricane Katrina had passed, but long before the flood waters had receded, came the deluge of do-gooders. The rebuilding of metropolitan New Orleans involved around 500 new nonprofits (in addition to well-established charities), over 1.5 million volunteers (as well as countless paid workers) and cost upward of $200 billion.

But as two new books show, the onerous and arguably ongoing road to recovery deeply affected the lives of New Orleans’s first-line rebuilders.

In “We Came to Rebuild Ne

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