Hurricane Katrina reveals far more than incompetence, lack of compassion, and ignorance on the part of the Bush administration, argues Giroux (English and cultural studies, McMaster U., Canada). The hurricane revealed a systemic, violent form of social engineering that treats marginalize class and racial groups as disposable. He analyzes this phenomena through the lens of biopolitics, which draws attention to relations of power concerned with the body as object of disciplinary techniques (in the Foucauldian sense) and with the body as something that needs to be "regularized," or "subject to those immaterial means of production that produce ways of life that enlarge the targets of control and regulation." Also influenced by Marxist theorists Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, he argues that biopolitics of modernization, neoliberalism, and militarization has created entire categories of people as "waste," and the effects of this were seen in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. Annotation ©2006 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)