HEAVY HISTORY
The Accidental City: Improvising New Orleans
by Lawrence N. Powell
&
The World That Made New Orleans: From Spanish Silver to Congo Square
by Ned Sublette
New Orleans sells its history as much as its food and music, so when I decided to make this move I knew I wanted to learn more about that rich and layered story. Defiantly enduring near the mouth of one of the world’s greatest meandering rivers, New Orleans‘s story is a long and winding . . . and twisted and contradictory . . . as the river itself. The two books reviewed today provide comprehensive, in-depth portraits of this complicated city’s first few centuries (neither makes it into the 20th) and this is both their strength and weakness.
You will find these books innocently beckoning from the shelves of local bookstores enticing casual tourists to part with their money, but beware: While well-written and skillful texts, these are slow and challenging reads. Both would be better suited for upper classman history courses than curling up in a coffee shop, though they certainly appropriate for the latter if you are an avid amateur history buff. I am lumping them together because they tell the same story in the same painstaking detail from slightly different perspectives. Sublette is the more lyrical and engaging of the two writers, though neither has the brilliance for turning history into captivating adventure like [Read more…]