A TALE OF TWO DISPLACED FAMILIES

City of Refuge

by: Tom Piazza

After reviewing Why New Orleans Matters last week, I was so impressed I picked up Tom Piazza’s post-Katrina novel, City of Refuge, as a companion piece. This proved more apropos than expected, for Piazza’s memoir of falling in love with New Orleans and then nearly losing it via Katrina so clearly forms the framework of City of Refuge that at times I could almost catch glimpses of its skeleton imbedded in the pages.

Published two years after Why New Orleans Matters, City of Refuge follows two families from opposite sides and strata of town. The two protagonists are near opposites, yet their diverging paths cross in the book’s opening and closing pages, tying them together through shared experience. SJ has always lived in the embattled Lower Ninth Ward but was saved from a life of violence and thuggery by the discipline of the Army and love of the wife who kept him straight until passing away at a young age. Craig, on the other hand, grew up in Ann Arbor but loved New Orleans culture and moved to the city with his wife over a decade prior. He now edits the local weekly magazine Gumbo. While residing deep in entitled Uptown, he has an eclectic and empathetic worldview and makes sure his young daughter and son are exposed to various view points, taking them to watch Indians emerge Mardi Gras morning and taking them to parades in the Lower Ninth (where he initially crosses paths with SJ and his sister).

The novel opens in [Read more…]

A TALE OF TWO CRESCENT CITIES

Why New Orleans Matters

by Tom Piazza

“New Orleans, in fact, is filled with people who came for Jazz Fest and never left. Or who went home and quit their job and came back. I think Jazz Fest teaches them what to love about the city, and how to love it. It is a kind of distillation of the mythology.”

When I read this paragraph—a concise and near-literal summary of this blog’s genesis—I almost laughed aloud. It’s no wonder I related so strongly to Why New Orleans Matters, Tom Piazza’s post-Katrina love letter, emotional exorcism, and national call to action. Much like I conceptualized My Year of Mardi Gras after a post-breakup spiritual renewal at the church of Jazz Fest, similar circumstances initially drew Piazza to the city: [Read more…]

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…]

UNMASKING NEW ORLEANS ONE MEAL AT A TIME

Gumbo Tales: Finding My Place At The New Orleans Table

by: Sara Roahen

THE REVIEW

I love this book. Period. If you have ever been or plan on going to New Orleans, buy it. Read it. Follow its recommendations. (Except for the duck fetus!) The end.

P.S.

I suppose I should elaborate, though I think the above suffices, for Gumbo Tales is the best non-fiction book I’ve read about New Orleans thus far. (Confederacy of Dunces is my fiction jewel.) Sara Roahen is a former food critic for Gambit Weekly who weaves her expertise into a history of New Orleans cuisine and culture, revealing how they shaped not only her life but that of the city as a whole. Along the way she effortlessly paints a holistic picture that should leave more earnest histories ‘slowly simmering greens’ with envy.

By relating her experiences both eating and cooking various dishes or styles (each  gets its own chapter) Roahen illustrates how she fell so deeply in love with this city while simultaneously providing a history lesson and guide to the city’s rich and bizarre traditions. She’s well-versed in both written and oral history, yet Roahen is also an obsessive [Read more…]

DIRTY LITTLE AVENGING ANGEL OR N’AWLINS YOUTH GONE WILD?

Dirty Little Angels

by Chris Tusa

Dirty Little Angels is a stark portrait of the challenges of modern adolescence, particularly in a city like New Orleans where violence can be part of the social fabric and wrong turns seem to far outnumber the straight and narrow. In a bold choice by first novelist, Chris Tusa, the narrative is written from the first person perspective of 16-year-old Hailey, who is not only trapped in that limbo between child and adult we call adolescence, but in between middle-class and working poor as her family’s economic foundation rapidly slips away. Neither of her self-involved parents are currently employed. Her mother, a nurse, has succumbed to depression after a miscarriage and has little energy left to care for her two surviving children. Her father is out of work and too proud to take an interview at Wal-Mart lined up by a neighbor, but instead chooses to focus his energy on playing pool and courting a waitress at a nearby Mexican restaurant who moonlights as a stripper.

In the absence of parental guidance, Hailey turns to a best friend whose narcissism and loose morals erode her self-esteem and lead her to questionable choices, and her brother who tries to look out for her but ultimately puts both of them in physical and spiritual peril through his friendship with Moses, an ex-con who masquerades as a preacher but whose swift and violent brand of administering the Lord’s judgment leads to the novel’s jarring conclusion. Although Chase tries to play the tough big brother, it is Hailey who ultimately faces up to the violent and corrupt ‘minister,’ forcing her to face her own Dirty Little Angels.

This novel weighs in at only 147 pages, making Hailey’s journey down the road to perdition swift and jolting. The one detour on this rapid road revolves around brief friendship Hailey forms with the husband of her father’s lover who is in the hospital dying of cancer. The narrator originally tracks him down to expose his wife’s duplicity and pry her away from her father, but Hailey finds she cannot reveal the painful truth to this gentle soul facing death so bravely. This man’s calm, courage, and compassion briefly fills the gaping void in Hailey’s life, but she soon returns to find his bed empty. It is a touching interlude in an otherwise bleak tale.

With its gritty language and brash imagery, this novel is not for the faint of heart. Tusa likes to play with language and challenge his readers, but if you’re willing to go along for the rocky ride you’ll be moved by a compelling portrait of teenage depression (the narrator feels as through cockroaches are scurrying around her head) and of innocence lost. Does Hailey truly succumb to moral erosion due to a lack of a positive social framework or is she merely a survivor making difficult but brave choices to save herself and her family? Tusa raises such questions that are meant to be argued late into the night at local bars and coffee shops as readers process the shocking ending and its implications for the state of our modern world.

 

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WHEN IT TAKES A CARTOONIST TO PAINT A FAITHFUL PORTRAIT

Frenchmen, Desire, Good Children

John Chase

New Orleans is a patchwork city woven together over centuries from former plantations and villages, resulting in a system of roads that were haphazardly designed and named over varying historical epochs. This can make for frustrated driving but great storytelling. In Frenchmen, Desire, Good Children, cartoonist John Chase reveals the city’s history through the odd, hilarious, and often sordid history of its streets. This book was first published in 1949 and is based upon lectures he began delivering while World War II still raged; thus, the language can be slightly dated, neighborhoods have sometimes grown and changed, and his racial bias (moreso regarding Native Americans) can at times make you cringe. Yet the very fact that this book remains a favorite history of the city and is in its eighth decade of print attests to the virtues that far outweigh its faults.

I re-read this book for this review and it definitely made more sense once I’d had time to navigate the city and become familiar with its layout. Still, there are plenty of humorous and colorful anticdotes to keep even the casual visitor entertained. Chase starts with the original city, the French Quarter, and follows the expansion outward, so the stories lose some of their charm as he moves to more modern sectors. There is much more history in the French Quarter and Garden District than across the river in Algiers or Westwego (the only town in the U.S. that is a complete sentence!)

The fact that a cartoonist and not historian guides this tour gives the book a jovial tone that has delighted readers for generations. For example, [Read more…]

READ BEANS ON MONDAY: A NEW NEW ORLEANS TRADITION

Since thinking up this blog I’ve wanted to do weekly reviews of New Orleans books and/or authors; though commissions on books are miniscule, it’s a way to at least start earning a penny for my thoughts as well as to start branching into the literary community and make connections. The goal of doing weekly reviews is a lofty one, though. My professor friend Jen Wesely once complained her real year-long sabbatical flew by and my retired parents never have free time, and so I find My Year of Mardi Gras mysteriously flying by. Still, though I may fall short some weeks, making this a weekly ritual led naturally to the ‘Read Beans on Monday’ pun. It’s not perfect, but months of contemplation conjured nothing better (Read Bins On Monday was 2nd choice and that’s horrendous!)

Last week I blogged about stumbling into McKeown’s Books on Tchoupitoulas and the warm greeting I received. As planned, I returned Thursday  for the monthly book club where everyone simply shares the latest non-fiction they’ve finished. Everyone again was welcoming and extremely helpful, tossing out names of potential contacts when I revealed I was a writer looking to connect. After taking my turn sharing a critique of the book below, I felt it was time to finally get off my tush and start reviewing. So it begins . . . .

IF KEN BURNS WOULD HAVE TACKLED THE BIG EASY:

Up From the Cradle Of Jazz: New Orleans Music Since World War II

Jason Berry, Jonathan Foose, & Tad Jones

Up From the Cradle of Jazz is a thorough and intensive overview of New Orleans music, focusing most of its energy on [Read more…]