2009 Nominations
Thank you for your nominations for the 2009 “One Book!”
Before we picked Gumbo Tales as our 2009 selection, we considered 87 titles.
The recurring theme in the nominations that was most noticeable was Hurricane Katrina. This category was composed of books such as A Season of Night: New Orleans Life After Katrina by Ian McNulty, Plenty Enough Suck to Go Around by Cheryl Wagner, Not Just the Levees Broke: My Life Before and After Katrina by Phyllis Montana LeBlanc, and Overcoming Katrina: African American Voices from the Cresecent City and Beyond by D’Ann R. Penner and Keith C. Ferdinand. There were many others.
Another theme that stood out was books that were about food. It wasn’t noticeable because of the number of titles nominated necessarily; it was the fact that three cookbooks were nominated: Cooking Up a Storm: Recipes Lost and Found from The Times-Picayune of New Orleans by Marcelle Bienvenu and Judy Walker, Crescent City Farmers Market Cookbook by Poppy Tooker and Alice Waters, and You Are Where You Eat: Stories and Recipes from the Neighborhoods of New Orleans by Elsa Hahne. While all three contained short features on the story behind the recipes or cooks, it’s a compliment to New Orleans’ food culture that cookbooks were nominated for a reading project, some more than once. Other books about food were Gumbo Tales, The Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals and In Defense of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto by Michael Pollan, and–depending on how strictly you’re classifying this category–Liquor: A Novel by Poppy Z. Brite.
The geography of South Louisiana was another theme of the nominations, with books such as Bayou Farewell: The Rich Life and Tragic Death of Louisiana’s Cajun Coast by Mike Tidwell, Bienville’s Dilemma: A Historical Geography of New Orleans by Richard Campanella, and Rising Tide: The Great Mississippi Flood of 1927 and How It Changed America by John M. Barry (One Book’s selection for its Spring 2005 program).
The five books that were nominated the most were, in alphabetical order: Babylon Rolling by Amanda Boyden, Nine Lives: Death and Life in New Orleans by Dan Baum, A Season of Night by Ian McNulty, The Sound of Building Coffins by Louis Maistros, and The World that Made New Orleans: From Spanish Silver to Congo Square by Ned Sublette.
Our four finalists were A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole, Sara Roahen’s Gumbo Tales, Dan Baum’s Nine Lives, and Through Black Spruce by Joseph Boyden. Although these were our finalists–and all great works–keep in mind that the following list contains a number of other great works that simply may not be practical or well-suited for the purposes of our project, or may have been on a topic we did not choose to pursue this year.
The nominations are listed in alphabetical order, and the description of each book is the publisher’s description, when available. Titles with an asterisk were nominated more than once.
This list is informational and not an endorsement of any particular work. However, if something piques your interest, we encourage you to research the book further and decide for yourself if you would like to read it. To see a list of the 2008 nominees, click here.
Your Nominations in Alphabetical Order
A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay by Michael Chabon; 656 pp
This brilliant epic novel set in New York and Prague introduces us to two misfit young men who make it big by creating comic-book superheroes. Joe Kavalier, a young artist who has also been trained in the art of Houdiniesque escape, has just smuggled himself out of Nazi-invaded Prague and landed in New York City. His Brooklyn cousin Sammy Clay is looking for a partner to create heroes, stories, and art for the latest novelty to hit America the comic book. Inspired by their own fears and dreams, Kavalier and Clay create the Escapists, The Monitor, and Luna Moth, inspired by the beautiful Rosa Saks, who will become linked by powerful ties to both men.
American Lion: Andrew Jackson in the White House by Jon Meacham; 512 pp
Andrew Jackson, his intimate circle of friends, and his tumultuous times are at the heart of this remarkable book about the man who rose from nothing to create the modern presidency. Beloved and hated, venerated and reviled, Andrew Jackson was an orphan who fought his way to the pinnacle of power, bending the nation to his will in the cause of democracy. Jackson’s election in 1828 ushered in a new and lasting era in which the people, not distant elites, were the guiding force in American politics. Democracy made its stand in the Jackson years, and he gave voice to the hopes and the fears of a restless, changing nation facing challenging times at home and threats abroad. To tell the saga of Jackson’s presidency, acclaimed author Jon Meacham goes inside the Jackson White House. Drawing on newly discovered family letters and papers, he details the human drama-the family, the women, and the inner circle of advisers-that shaped Jackson’s private world through years of storm and victory.
One of our most significant yet dimly recalled presidents, Jackson was a battle-hardened warrior, the founder of the Democratic Party, and the architect of the presidency as we know it. His story is one of violence, sex, courage, and tragedy. With his powerful persona, his evident bravery, and his mystical connection to the people, Jackson moved the White House from the periphery of government to the center of national action, articulating a vision of change that challenged entrenched interests to heed the popular will-or face his formidable wrath. The greatest of the presidents who have followed Jackson in the White House-from Lincoln to Theodore Roosevelt to FDR to Truman-have found inspiration in his example, and virtue in his vision.
Jackson was the most contradictory of men. The architect of the removal of Indians from their native lands, he was warmly sentimental and risked everything to give more power to ordinary citizens. He was, in short, a lot like his country: alternately kind and vicious, brilliant and blind; and a man who fought a lifelong war to keep the republic safe-no matter what it took.
The Audacity of Hope by Barack Obama; 375 pp
In July 2004, Barack Obama electrified the Democratic National Convention with an address that spoke to Americans across the political spectrum. One phrase in particular anchored itself in listeners’ minds, a reminder that for all the discord and struggle to be found in our history as a nation, we have always been guided by a dogged optimism in the future, or what Senator Obama called “the audacity of hope.”
Now, in The Audacity of Hope, Senator Obama calls for a different brand of politics-a politics for those weary of bitter partisanship and alienated by the “endless clash of armies” we see in congress and on the campaign trail; a politics rooted in the faith, inclusiveness, and nobility of spirit at the heart of “our improbable experiment in democracy.” He explores those forces-from the fear of losing to the perpetual need to raise money to the power of the media-that can stifle even the best-intentioned politician. He also writes, with surprising intimacy and self-deprecating humor, about settling in as a senator, seekingto balance the demands of public service and family life, and his own deepening religious commitment.
At the heart of this book is Senator Obama’s vision of how we can move beyond our divisions to tackle concrete problems. He examines the growing economic insecurity of American families, the racial and religious tensions within the body politic, and the transnational threats-from terrorism to pandemic-that gather beyond our shores. And he grapples with the role that faith plays in a democracy-where it is vital and where it must never intrude. Underlying his stories about family, friends, members of the Senate, even the president, is a vigorous search for connection: the foundation for a radically hopeful political consensus.
A senator and a lawyer, a professor and a father, a Christian and a skeptic, and above all a student of history and human nature, Senator Obama has written a book of transforming power. Only by returning to the principles that gave birth to our Constitution, he says, can Americans repair a political process that is broken, and restore to working order a government that has fallen dangerously out of touch with millions of ordinary Americans. Those Americans are out there, he writes-”waiting for Republicans and Democrats to catch up with them.”
* Babylon Rolling by Amanda Boyden ; 320 pp
A glittering, gritty, and unflinching story of five families living along one block in New Orleans, a city on the verge of transformation, from the author of Pretty Little Dirty.
It is the summer of 2004, and Orchid Street is changing. Newcomers Ariel May and her husband, Ed, relocated from Minnesota, are trying to make sense of the Southern city. From her front porch, Philomenia Beauregard de Bruges watches her new neighbors, the Guptas, as they move into one of the biggest homes. Across the way, Daniel Harris, aka Fearius, has just been released from juvenile detention. And Cerise Brown, a longtime resident now in her late seventies, hopes only to pass the rest of her days in peace.
But with one random accident, a scene of horror on Cerise’s front lawn, the whole neighborhood converges on the sidewalk to help, to cast blame, and to offer hope. And as Hurricane Ivan churns his way toward the city, bringing a different series of challenges, these new relationships tighten, intertwining the families’ paths for better and for worse.
Told in five achingly real voices, Babylon Rolling is the story of one year on Orchid Street, a place where lives clash and collide, and where the humid air is charged with constant wanting. Offering a bold understanding of human nature and the hidden prejudices we harbor, Babylon Rolling is a powerful portrait of racism in America and a city on the edge of transformation.
* Bayou Farewell by Mike Tidwell; 368 pp
Mike Tidwell knew nothing of the disappearing bayou country when he first visited the Cajun coast of Louisiana, but the evidence was all around him: the skeletons of oak trees killed by the salinity of the groundwater, whole cemeteries sinking into swampland and out of sight, telephone poles in deep, standing water. Thanks to human hands, the storied Louisiana coast was eroding, subsiding, and joining the Gulf of Mexico—making it the fastest disappearing landmass on Earth. Yet no one seemed to know how to talk about the problem. Tidwell, a celebrated travel and environmental writer, decided to begin the much-needed conversation, and this vivid, elegiac book is the result.
Tidwell introduces us to the surprisingly varied population of the area: the Cajun men and women who work the seasonal shrimp harvest, the Vietnamese fishermen, the Houma Indians driven to the farthest ends of the bayou by the first European settlers. He describes the food, the music, the culture, and the life of all those who live along the bayous. And under his keenly observant eye, the bayou itself becomes a compelling character—reminding us of how much we stand to lose if we fail to address the problems facing this most vibrant of places.
Part travelogue, part environmental expose, Bayou Farewell is the richly evocative chronicle of the author’s travels through a place and a way of life that are vanishing virtually before our eyes.
Bienville’s Dilemma: A Historical Geography of New Orleans by Richard Campanella; 429 pp
Starting in 1699, a teenaged French Canadian named Jean Baptiste Le Moyne, sieur de Bienville grappled with a high-stakes dilemma: where should the primary city for the new French colony of Louisiana be located? Bienville eventually selected, in 1718, a swampy crescent of alluvium nestled between a flood-prone river and a storm-prone tidal lagoon.
Over the next three centuries, that city, New Orleans, would struggle through countless challenges to become the largest city in the South and among the most important in the nation. It remains today a beacon of urban and cultural distinction, and a prophetic city for a troubled world to watch. All New Orleans’ glories, tragedies, contributions, and complexities can be traced back to the geographical dilemma Bienville confronted in 1718.
Bienville’s Dilemma presents sixty-eight articles on the historical geography of New Orleans, covering the formation and foundation of the city, its urbanization and population, its “humanization” into a place of distinction, the manipulation of its environment, its devastation by Hurricane Katrina, and its ongoing recovery.
Richard Campanella, a geographer at Tulane University, is the author of Geographies of New Orleans: Urban Fabrics Before the Storm (Center for Louisiana Studies, 2006), winner of the Louisiana Endowment for the Humanities’ “Book of the Year” Award; Time and Place in New Orleans (2002), selected as the Gulf South Booksellers Association’s “Book of the Year;” and the critically acclaimed photographic survey New Orleans Then and Now (1999). His research has been published in the Journal of American History, Journal of Architectural Education, Technology in Society, and Photogrammetric Engineering and Remote Sensing, and cited by the New York Times, National Public Radio, and American Experience (PBS). Originally from Brooklyn, New York, Campanella is the associate director of the Center for Bioenvironmental Research and a research professor with Tulane’s Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences. He and his wife Marina live in the New Orleans neighborhood known by some as “Bywater,” and others as the “Upper Ninth Ward.”
Boundaries: When to Say Yes, How to Say No, to Take Control of Your Life by Henry Cloud; 304 pp
Having clear boundaries is essential to a healthy, balanced lifestyle. A boundary is a personal property line that marks those things for which we are responsible. In other words, boundaries define who we are and who we are not. Boundaries impact all areas of our lives: Physical boundaries help us determine who may touch us and under what circumstances — Mental boundaries give us the freedom to have our own thoughts and opinions — Emotional boundaries help us to deal with our own emotions and disengage from the harmful, manipulative emotions of others — Spiritual boundaries help us to distinguish God’s will from our own and give us renewed awe for our Creator — Often, Christians focus so much on being loving and unselfish that they forget their own limits and limitations. When confronted with their lack of boundaries, they ask: – Can I set limits and still be a loving person? – What are legitimate boundaries? – What if someone is upset or hurt by my boundaries? – How do I answer someone who wants my time, love, energy, or money? – Aren’t boundaries selfish? – Why do I feel guilty or afraid when I consider setting boundaries? Dr. Henry Cloud and Dr. John Townsend offer biblically-based answers to these and other tough questions, showing us how to set healthy boundaries with our parents, spouses, children, friends, co-workers, and even ourselves.
But Soft: We Are Observed (Shadowed!) by Hilaire Belloc; 248 pp
Cain’s Version by Frank Durham; 320 pp
Lindy Caton, middle-aged, attractive and recently divorced, accepts a position as Director of the Moulton Foundation in small-town Louisiana to be closer to her aging father. While building her new life, she encounters and assumes care of three elderly, eccentric women living in subsistence.
As her relationship with them grows, she discovers the extraordinary secret of their past that sweeps her into the dramatic return of an itinerant son seeking to reconcile with his mother over an ancient act of cruelty.
The Cajuns: Americanization of a People by Shane K. Bernard; 196 pp
The past sixty years have shaped and reshaped the group of French-speaking Louisiana people known as the Cajuns. During this period they have become much like other Americans and yet have remained strikingly distinct. The Cajuns: Americanization of a People explores these six decades and analyzes the forces that had an impact on Louisiana’s Acadiana.
In the 1940s, when America entered World War II, so too did the isolated Cajuns. Cajun soldiers fought alongside troops from Brooklyn and Berkeley and absorbed aspects of new cultures. In the 1950s as rock ‘n’ roll and television crackled across Louisiana airwaves, Cajun music makers responded with their own distinct versions. In the 1960s, empowerment and liberation movements turned the South upside down. During the 1980s, as things Cajun became an absorbing national fad, “Cajun” became a kind of brand identity used for selling everything from swamp tours to boxed rice dinners. At the dawn of the twenty-first century, the advent of a new information age launched “Cyber-Cajuns” onto a worldwide web. All these forces have pushed and pulled at the fabric of Cajun life but have not destroyed it.
A Cajun himself, the author of this book has an intense personal fascination in his people.
By linking seemingly local events in the Cajuns’ once isolated south Louisiana homeland to national and even global events, Bernard demonstrates that by the middle of the twentieth century the Cajuns for the first time in their ethnic story were engulfed in the currents of mainstream American life and yet continued to make outstandingly distinct contributions.
The Camino: A Journey of the Spirit by Shirley MacLaine; 320 pp
It has been nearly three decades since Shirley MacLaine commenced her brave and public commitment to chronicling her personal quest for spiritual understanding. In testament to the endurance and vitality of her message, each of her eight legendary bestsellers — from Don’t Fall Off the Mountain to My Lucky Stars — continues today to attract, dazzle, and transform countless new readers. Now Shirley is back — with her most breathtakingly powerful and unique book yet.
This is the story of a journey. It is the eagerly anticipated and altogether startling culmination of Shirley MacLaine’s extraordinary — and ultimately rewarding — road through life. The riveting odyssey began with a pair of anonymous handwritten letters imploring Shirley to make a difficult pilgrimage along the Santiago de Compostela Camino in Spain. Throughout history, countless illustrious pilgrims from all over Europe have taken up the trail. It is an ancient — and allegedly enchanted — pilgrimage. People from St. Francis of Assisi and Charlemagne to Ferdinand and Isabella to Dante and Chaucer have taken the journey, which comprises a nearly 500-mile trek across highways, mountains and valleys, cities and towns, and fields. Now it would be Shirley’s turn.
For Shirley, the Camino was both an intense spiritual and physical challenge. A woman in her sixth decade completing such a grueling trip on foot in thirty days at twenty miles per day was nothing short of remarkable. But even more astounding was the route she took spiritually: back thousands of years, through past lives to the very origin of the universe. Immensely gifted with intelligence, curiosity, warmth, and a profound openness to people and places outside her own experience, Shirley MacLaine is truly an American treasure. And once again, she brings her inimitable qualities of mind and heart to her writing. Balancing and negotiating the revelations inspired by the mysterious energy of the Camino, she endured her exhausting journey to Compostela until it gradually gave way to a far more universal voyage: that of the soul. Through a range of astonishing and liberating visions and revelations, Shirley saw into the meaning of the cosmos, including the secrets of the ancient civilizations of Atlantis and Lemuria, insights into human genesis, the essence of gender and sexuality, and the true path to higher love.
With rich insight, humility, and her trademark grace, Shirley MacLaine gently leads us on a sacred adventure toward an inexpressibly transcendent climax. The Camino promises readers the journey of a thousand lifetimes.
Chummy’s Spirit by Hal Clark; 256 pp
Chummy’s Spirit tells the inspirational story of Cordelia “Chummy” Johnson, who learns that the remains of her son, James, have been found in Vietnam 32 years after he was reported missing in action. Chummy has never left Louisiana, but is determined to visit the site where her son’s remains were located. This long-awaited revelation also encourages her to finally inquire about the sketchy details surrounding the death of her husband, who was murdered in a New Orleans brothel ten years after James’ disappearance.
Despite Chummy’s amazing faith and extraordinary psychological resources, and the support of both her church community and other women who have experienced their own tragic losses, her hopes of visiting Vietnam are constantly challenged by her violent, drug-infested New Orleans neighborhood and non-supportive nephew, Bryan, who believes she’s an unrealistic old lady. Bryan reluctantly travels with Chummy to Vietnam. There, Mr. Bao Tin, a mysterious, ex-North Vietnamese Army officer, escorts them to Cu Chi, Tay Ninh and Nha Trang, Vietnam. In addition to seeing where James’ remains were found, Chummy and Bryan meet the Vietnamese woman that James had planned to marry.
City of Refuge by Tom Piazza; 416 pp
In August 2005, SJ Williams, a carpenter who has lived the Lower Ninth Ward all his life, is headed for a confrontation with his young nephew Wesley, who has just been arrested for beating up his girlfriend. SJ’s older sister Lucy, Wesley’s mother, is a soulful mess beloved by everyone, but she has been unable to corral her son, and SJ fears he is about to be lost for good.
Meanwhile, across town, Craig Donaldson, a Midwestern transplant and the editor of the city’s (fictitious) weekly newspaper, is facing deepening cracks in his own family. Craig’s love for New Orleans music and culture brought them to the city, but his wife Alice’s alarm at the city’s crime, poverty, and bad schools has become an ever-widening wedge between her and Craig, and their two young children Annie and Malcolm.
When the storm breaks, and the levee with it, SJ’s home is flooded and his family scattered – Lucy to the Superdome and then to Missouri, Wesley to upstate New York, and SJ to Texas, where he struggles to locate, and reunite with, Lucy and Wesley. The Donaldsons, too, find their family strained to breaking by the storm: Alice persuades Craig to evacuate, and they flee—first to Jackson, Mississippi, and then finally to Alice’s family in Chicago. After the storm, Craig is determined to return, but he soon realizes that he may have to choose between the city he loves or the family he hoped to raise there.
Reaching across America—from the neighborhoods of New Orleans to Houston, Chicago, and elsewhere—City of Refuge explores this turning point in American culture. Like John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath, it sounds complex chords of race, class, culture, and regional identity, but always through the double helix of these two families’ lives. Piazza’s characters will live in readers’ minds and hearts, and their encounter with the storm will confront us all with raw truths about our nation and ourselves. Rich with emotional insight and unforgettable scenes, it will challenge, and deeply move, every reader.
The Clearing by Tim Gautreaux; 336 pp
The Clearing is set deep in the Louisiana swamp in 1923, in the isolated town of Nimbus, a place hard to get to and even harder to get out of alive. Nimbus is a raw place, filled with snakes, alligators, hard-fighting mill workers, and bountiful cypress trees. There is no church, no school, no civilizing influence of any kind. The saloon, run by the cousin of a Sicilian mobster from Chicago, is the only public institution, and it regularly erupts in drunken, murderous fights. Only brute force-in the shape of lawman Byron Aldridge-maintains a precarious order in the town. Byron is back from WWI, where the killing he both witnessed and committed has forever changed him. Once the heir apparent to his father’s timber empire, he has fled from his family in Pennsylvania into this remote region, where his life consists of breaking up brawls and listening to sentimental music on his Victrola.
Byron’s father decides to send someone down to bring him back into the fold, and when younger brother Randolph arrives in the swamps, he finds himself drawn into a world unlike anything he has ever encountered. Randolph soon discovers that his own morality, his own sure sense of right and wrong, is badly shaken by his brother’s actions. Is it justifiable to use violence to stop violence? Is it always a sin to take another life, even when doing so might save others? These are the moral questions most powerfully dramatized in The Clearing. For when Randolph decides to shut down the saloon on Sundays, the most violent day of the week, the owners down river in Tiger Island begin a cycle of brutality and revenge that threatens to engulf Randolph and Byron, their wives, their workers, and even an innocent child.
In writing that is vividly alive to both the rich physical texture of place and to the most enduring human questions, The Clearing is a tour de force of the moral imagination.
Coffee Colored Dreams by Pamela Davis Noland; 226 pp
Hot steamy New Orleans, LA is the setting for this love story that is laced with pure Southern sexiness. Main characters Celia DuBois and Jeffrey Jackson are going through the ups and downs of love and are experiencing the consequences of past relationships where there was a lack of self-love. Relationship issues, skin color bias, domestic violence, distrust, self-doubt and irresponsible sexual behavior are just a few of the issues that is placed under a microscope and then enlarged for the reader to absorb as both characters speak in first person, giving the reader an up close and personal view of the story being told. Benny’s Place, a Coffee House/Café located in the French Quarters of New Orleans; charming and visually nostalgic embodying the ambiance of a 1940′s juke joint, is where Celia and Jeff meet. Benny Thibodeaux, the proprietor (or as Benny pronounces, pro pie ta) of the cafe is a New Orleans native whose wisdom and clairvoyance is the motivational balm that both Celia DuBois and Jeffrey Jackson are in desperate need of.
Cold Streak by Lewis Aleman; 272 pp
Her family is brutally murdered, and she finds herself on her knees praying for things she never could have imagined. Her dark journey of revenge takes off as she hunts her family’s killers, while being chased down by a troubled detective, his lovelorn partner, and an inner voice that grants her no peace. Her quest lures her through an explosive music scene, down unlit alleyways, to the edge of a towering church rooftop, and into the nightmarish landscape of her own mind. Will she get her justice before time runs out? Will her own lust for vengeance consume all that is left of her in the process?
* A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole; 405 pp.
The ordinary folk of New Orleans seem to think he is unhinged as well. Ignatius ignores them as he heaves his vast bulk through the city’s fleshpots in a noble crusade against vice, modernity and ignorance. But his momma has a nasty surprise in store for him. Ignatius must get a job. Undaunted, he uses his new-found employment to further his mission – and now he has a pirate costume and a hot-dog cart to do it with …
* Cooking up a Storm: Recipies Lost and Found from the Times-Picayune of New Orleans by Marcelle Bienvenu & Judy Walker; 368 pp
After Hurricane Katrina devastated New Orleans thousands of people lost their keepsakes and family treasures forever. As residents started to rebuild their lives The Times-Picayune of New Orleans became a post-hurricane swapping place for old recipes that were washed away in the storm. The newspaper has compiled 250 of these delicious authentic recipes along with the stories about how they came to be and who created them. Cooking Up a Storm includes the very best of classic and contemporary New Orleans cuisine from seafood and meat to desserts and cocktails. But it also tells the story recipe by recipe of one of the great food cities in the world and the determination of its citizens to preserve and safeguard their culinary legacy.
Cradle to Cradle: Remaking the Way We Make Things by William McDonough & Michael Braungart; 208 pp
A manifesto for a radically different philosophy and practice of manufacture and environmentalism
“Reduce, reuse, recycle” urge environmentalists; in other words, do more with less in order to minimize damage. As William McDonough and Michael Braungart argue in their provocative, visionary book, however, this approach perpetuates a one-way, “cradle to grave” manufacturing model that dates to the Industrial Revolution and casts off as much as 90 percent of the materials it uses as waste, much of it toxic. Why not challenge the notion that human industry must inevitably damage the natural world, they ask.
In fact, why not take nature itself as our model? A tree produces thousands of blossoms in order to create another tree, yet we do not consider its abundance wasteful but safe, beautiful, and highly effective; hence, “waste equals food” is the first principle the book sets forth. Products might be designed so that, after their useful life, they provide nourishment for something new-either as “biological nutrients” that safely re-enter the environment or as “technical nutrients” that circulate within closed-loop industrial cycles, without being “downcycled” into low-grade uses (as most “recyclables” now are).
Elaborating their principles from experience (re)designing everything from carpeting to corporate campuses, the authors make an exciting and viable case for change.
Crescent City Farmers Market Cookbook by Poppy Tooker and Alice Waters; 216 pp
Thirteen years in the making, the Crescent City Farmers Market Cookbook is ready for the audience that has long been awaiting it. The world’s loudly proclaimed interest in New Orleans-its food, its culture, and most recently its struggle to rebuild after one of the greatest disasters in modern times-proves that, now more than ever, there is tremendous demand for such a book.
Poppy Tooker tells the story of the Crescent City Farmers Market through her distinctly New Orleans voice as one of a local food preservationist, Slow Food New Orleans founder, and longtime market collaborator. With a market tradition dating back to the late 1600s, the story of the rise and decline of New Orleans’ city markets prior to the creation of the Crescent City Farmers Market is both educational and entertaining. Tooker recalls whimsical and wacky market events with both prose and archival photography. On a more serious note, she tells compelling stories of Hurricane Katrina’s devastating impact on market vendors from an insider’s point of view. More than 70 profiles of key market vendors are included, humanizing the book’s recipes in a truly unique way.
The Crescent City Farmers Market Cookbook incorporates renowned New Orleans chefs’ recipes inspired by the region’s seasonal bounty, as well as family favorites from market vendors and shoppers. More than 125 recipes, ranging from Creole classics such as Oysters Rockefeller, Gumbo Z’Herbes, and Bread Pudding to Gator-Tater Salad, Asian Pear Slaw, Chevre-Stuffed Squash Blossoms, Kakurei Turnip and Pork Fricasse, Barbecue Shrimp Pie, and Satsuma- Chocolate Gelato reveal why New Orleans is one of the great food cities of the world.
Dark at the Roots: A Memoir by Sarah Thyre; 310 pp
Given the Nickname “Family Liar” by her father around the time she started talking, Sarah Thyre was the second of five children to be born into a southern family of Roman Catholics. Confused by this endearment, but eager to live up to it, Sarah quickly managed to get herself into precarious situations. Whether it is small Sarah accidentally going “poddy” in the garage during a game of hide-and-seek, medium-sized Sarah surviving a fishing trip with her volatile father, or full-sized Sarah unwittingly stealing a car from her boyfriend’s employer, grown-up Sarah shares each story with self-effacing sincerity and a seemingly invincible sense of humor. The ability to turn pain into punch lines is a skill that Sarah honed by necessity: Her father was unpredictably moody and routinely lashed out at his young family until eventually Sarah’s mother moved her four girls and newborn son out of the “comfort” of marriage and into the uncertainty of single parenting. The regular meals and the indoor heating were soon drained from their middle-class lifestyle. Still, Sarah boldly tried to maintain a facade of wealth–fooling no one but herself. This memoir flees from Sarah’s childhood with the high-wire urgency of improv comedy and the ever-teetering forward momentum of a runaway toddler while holding tight to the bits that made her the wry, deeply funny person she is today.
Dead Man Walking: An Eyewitness Account Of The Death Penalty In The United States by Helen Prejean; 288 pp
In 1982, Sister Helen Prejean became the spiritual advisor to Patrick Sonnier, the convicted killer of two teenagers who was sentenced to die in the electric chair of Louisiana’s Angola State Prison. In the months before Sonnier’s death, the Roman Catholic nun came to know a man who was as terrified as he had once been terrifying. At the same time, she came to know the families of the victims and the men whose job it was to execute him–men who often harbored doubts about the rightness of what they were doing.
Out of that dreadful intimacy comes a profoundly moving spiritual journey through our system of capital punishment. Confronting both the plight of the condemned and the rage of the bereaved, the needs of a crime-ridden society and the Christian imperative of love, Dead Man Walking is an unprecedented look at the human consequences of the death penalty, a book that is both enlightening and devastating.
Dirt: The Erosion of Civilizations by David R. Montgomery; 286 pp
Dirt, soil, call it what you want-it’s everywhere we go. It is the root of our existence, supporting our feet, our farms, our cities. This fascinating yet disquieting book finds, however, that we are running out of dirt, and it’s no laughing matter. An engaging natural and cultural history of soil that sweeps from ancient civilizations to modern times, Dirt: The Erosion of Civilizations explores the compelling idea that we are-and have long been-using up Earth’s soil. Once bare of protective vegetation and exposed to wind and rain, cultivated soils erode bit by bit, slowly enough to be ignored in a single lifetime but fast enough over centuries to limit the lifespan of civilizations. A rich mix of history, archaeology and geology, Dirt traces the role of soil use and abuse in the history of Mesopotamia, Ancient Greece, the Roman Empire, China, European colonialism, Central America, and the American push westward. We see how soil has shaped us and we have shaped soil-as society after society has risen, prospered, and plowed through a natural endowment of fertile dirt. David R. Montgomery sees in the recent rise of organic and no-till farming the hope for a new agricultural revolution that might help us avoid the fate of previous civilizations.
Disgrace by J. M. Coetzee ; 224 pp
Set in post-apartheid South Africa, J. M. Coetzee’s searing novel tells the story of David Lurie, a twice divorced, 52-year-old professor of communications and Romantic Poetry at Cape Technical University. Lurie believes he has created a comfortable, if somewhat passionless, life for himself. He lives within his financial and emotional means. Though his position at the university has been reduced, he teaches his classes dutifully; and while age has diminished his attractiveness, weekly visits to a prostitute satisfy his sexual needs. He considers himself happy. But when Lurie seduces one of his students, he sets in motion a chain of events that will shatter his complacency and leave him utterly disgraced.
Lurie pursues his relationship with the young Melanie-whom he describes as having hips “as slim as a twelve-year-old’s”-obsessively and narcissistically, ignoring, on one occasion, her wish not to have sex. When Melanie and her father lodge a complaint against him, Lurie is brought before an academic committee where he admits he is guilty of all the charges but refuses to express any repentance for his acts. In the furor of the scandal, jeered at by students, threatened by Melanie’s boyfriend, ridiculed by his ex-wife, Lurie is forced to resign and flees Cape Town for his daughter Lucy’s smallholding in the country. There he struggles to rekindle his relationship with Lucy and to understand the changing relations of blacks and whites in the new South Africa. But when three black strangers appear at their house asking to make a phone call, a harrowing afternoon of violence follows which leaves both of them badly shaken and further estranged from one another. After a brief return to Cape Town, where Lurie discovers his home has also been vandalized, he decides to stay on with his daughter, who is pregnant with the child of one of her attackers. Now thoroughly humiliated, Lurie devotes himself to volunteering at the animal clinic, where he helps put down diseased and unwanted dogs. It is here, Coetzee seems to suggest, that Lurie gains a redeeming sense of compassion absent from his life up to this point.
Dogs I Have Met: And the People They Found by Ken Foster; 192 pp
Ken Foster knows that a dog can change a person’s life. And that several dogs can change even more. For The Dogs Who Found Me, the author appeared in major media interviews such as NPR’s “Fresh Air” with Terry Gross, and received hundreds of letters and stories about other karmic canine rescues. Many of these heartwarming stories are now compiled in this all-new follow-up to the original bestseller. Dogs I Have Met introduces us to injured California pit bull Jimmy, among others, as well as to one woman who opened her house to 55 stray dogs. Ken Foster will once again travel the country for interviews and in-store events to promote dog rescue and this all-new national bestseller.
The Dogs Who Found Me: What I’ve Learned from Pets Who Were Left Behind by Ken Foster; 208 pp
Disaster-prone writer and reluctant dog rescuer Ken Foster finds himself centered by the presence of an ever-growing collection of stray dogs. In this memoir-cum-guidebook, Foster describes the dogs who found him, from a beagle abandoned in a New York City dog run to a pit bull in a Mississippi truck stop. Their circumstances offer a grounding counterpoint to his own recent misfortunes: the shock of New York City after 9/11, the deaths of two close friends, a near fatal heart condition and the evacuation of New Orleans during Hurricane Katrina. He writes eloquently about the world of animal shelters, the nature of compassion, and the empowering effect of rescuing–and being rescued.
Dreams from My Father by Barack Obama; 480 pp
In this lyrical, unsentimental, and compelling memoir, the son of a black African father and a white American mother searches for a workable meaning to his life as a black American. It begins in New York, where Barack Obama learns that his father-a figure he knows more as a myth than as a man-has been killed in a car accident. This sudden death inspires an emotional odyssey-first to a small town in Kansas, from which he retraces the migration of his mother’s family to Hawaii, and then to Kenya, where he meets the African side of his family, confronts the bitter truth of his father’s life, and at last reconciles his divided inheritance.
Energy Future: Report of the Energy Project at the Harvard Business School by Robert Stobaugh & Daniel Yergin (editors); 459 pp
Field Guide to Nola Nature by Patricia Sills Bernstein; 58 pp
Recently I have been healing myself through daily nature walks in the empty golf course at City Park. I have realized that nature gives to us through the sun, through the oxygen, and through its majestic beauty. I have tried to capture several parts of my experience from this past summer’s walks with the dogs in the park.
This book is a small representation of a much larger environment. It is a reminder of what exists around us that we are too busy to visit. I like the old saying “stop and smell the roses.” I think more of us need to remember it and put nature back into our daily lives. Can you imagine being mugged for some okra seeds?
First They Killed My Father by Loung Ung ; 288 pp
One of seven children of a high-ranking government official, Loung Ung lived a privileged life in the Cambodian capital of Phnom Penh until the age of five. Then, in April 1975, Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge army stormed into the city, forcing Ung’s family to flee and, eventually, to disperse. Loung was trained as a child soldier in a work camp for orphans, her siblings were sent to labor camps, and those who survived the horrors would not be reunited until the Khmer Rouge was destroyed.
Harrowing yet hopeful, Loung’s powerful story is an unforgettable account of a family shaken and shattered, yet miraculously sustained by courage and love in the face of unspeakable brutality.
Fresh Kills by Bill Loehfelm; 336 pp
In Fresh Kills, the murder of John Sanders, Sr. on a New York street corner reunites his estranged and abused children, John, Jr. and Julia. While Julia struggles to keep things together on the home front, Junior, unhinged by his father’s death, searches for the killer across the bleak, haunted landscape of his Staten Island hometown. Complicating Junior’s pursuit are two police detectives: one, a former childhood friend; the other, a veteran cop who might have his own reasons to wish John, Sr. dead. Junior’s affair with his high school sweetheart doesn’t exactly simplify the situation either, and his emotional state crumbles under the pressure coming at him from every side. When the opportunity for revenge presents itself, Junior must decide whether he will continue the chain of violence that has nearly destroyed his life, or give in to the possibility of a new beginning.
* Gumbo Tales: Finding My Place at the New Orleans Table by Sara Roahen; 304 pp
Celebrating New Orleans’ food culture, one specialty at a time. A cocktail is more than a segue to dinner when it’s a Sazerac, an anise-laced drink of rye whiskey and bitters indigenous to New Orleans. For Wisconsin native Sara Roahen, a Sazerac is also a fine accompaniment to raw oysters, a looking glass into the cocktail culture of her own family-and one more way to gain a foothold in her beloved adopted city. Roahen’s stories of personal discovery introduce readers to New Orleans’ well-known signatures-gumbo, po-boys, red beans and rice-and its lesser-known gems: the pho of its Vietnamese immigrants, the braciolone of its Sicilians, and the ya-ka-mein of its street culture. By eating and cooking her way through a place as unique and unexpected as its infamous turducken, Roahen finds a home. And then Katrina. With humor, poignancy, and hope, she conjures up a city that reveled in its food traditions before the storm-and in many ways has been saved by them since.
A Hope in the Unseen: An American Odyssey from the Inner City to the Ivy League by Ron Suskind; 384 pp
It is 1993, and Cedric Jennings is a bright and ferociously determined honor student at Ballou, a high school in one of Washington D.C.’s most dangerous neighborhoods, where the dropout rate is well into double digits and just 80 students out of more than 1,350 boast an average of B or better. At Ballou, Cedric has almost no friends. He eats lunch in a classroom most days, plowing through the extra work he has asked for, knowing that he’s really competing with kids from other, harder schools. Cedric Jennings’s driving ambition-which is fully supported by his forceful mother-is to attend a top-flight college.
In September 1995, after years of near superhuman dedication, he realizes that ambition when he begins as a freshman at Brown University. In this updated edition, A Hope in the Unseen chronicles Cedric’s odyssey during his last two years of high school, follows him through his difficult first year at Brown, and now tells the story of his subsequent successes in college and the world of work.
* The House of Dance and Feathers: A Museum by Ronald W. Lewis by Ronald W. Lewis and the Neighborhood Story Project; 200 pp
In a backyard on Tupelo Street, in the Lower Ninth Ward of New Orleans, Ronald W. Lewis has assembled a museum to the various worlds he inhabits. Built in 2003, and rebuilt after Katrina, the House of Dance & Feathers represents many New Orleans societies: Mardi Gras Indians, Social Aid and Pleasure Clubs, Bone Gangs, and Parade Krewes.
More than just a catalogue of the artifacts in the museum, this book is a map of these worlds as experienced by Ronald W. Lewis. Through stories and conversation, we come to know the wide network of people who construct and nurture performance traditions in the city.
The Illustrated Man by Ray Bradbury; 288 pp
The Illustrated Man is classic Bradbury –a collection of tales that breathe and move, animated by sharp, intaken breath and flexing muscle. Here are eighteen startling visions of humankind’s destiny, unfolding across a canvas of decorated skin–visions as keen as the tattooist’s needle and as colorful as the inks that indelibly stain the body.
The images, ideas, sounds and scents that abound in this phantasmagoric sideshow are provocative and powerful: the mournful cries of celestial travelers cast out cruelly into a vast, empty space of stars and blackness … the sight of gray dust settling over a forgotten outpost on a road that leads nowhere … the pungent odor of Jupiter on a returning father’s clothing. Here living cities take their vengeance, technology awakens the most primal natural instincts, Martian invasions are foiled by the good life and the glad hand, and dreams are carried aloft in junkyard rockets.
Ray Bradbury’s The Illustrated Man is a kaleidoscopic blending of magic, imagination, and truth, widely believed to be one of the Grandmaster’s premier accomplishments: as exhilarating as interplanetary travel, as maddening as a walk in a million-year rain, and as comforting as simple, familiar rituals on the last night of the world. He was a riot of rockets and fountains and people, in such intricate detail and color that you could hear the voices murmuring, small and muted, from the crowds that inhabited his body.
Ray Bradbury brings wonders alive. A peerless American storyteller, his oeuvre has been celebrated for decades–from The Martian Chronicles and Fahrenheit 451 to Dandelion Wine and Something Wicked This Way Comes.
In Defense of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto by Michael Pollan; 256 pp
Michael Pollan’s last book , The Omnivore’s Dilemma, launched a national conversation about the American way of eating; now In Defense of Food shows us how to change it, one meal at a time. Pollan proposes a new answer to the question of what we should eat that comes down to seven simple but liberating words: Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants. Pollan’s bracing and eloquent manifesto shows us how we can start making thoughtful food choices that will enrich our lives, enlarge our sense of what it means to be healthy, and bring pleasure back to eating.
Island in a Storm: a rising sea, a vanishing coast, and a nineteenth century disaster that warns of a warmer world by Abby Sallenger; 304 pp
In the mid-nineteenth century, the Isle Derniere was emerging as an exclusive summer resort on the coast of the Gulf of Mexico. About one hundred miles from New Orleans, it attracted the most prominent members of antebellum Louisiana society. Hundreds of affluent planters and merchants retreated to the island, not just for its pleasures, but also to escape the scourge of yellow fever epidemics that ravaged cities like New Orleans each summer. Then, without warning, on August 10, 1856, a ferocious hurricane swept across the island, killing half of its four hundred inhabitants. The Isle Derniere was left barren, except for a strange forest standing in the surf.
Drawing from a rich trove of newspaper articles, letters, diaries, and interviews, Abby Sallenger re-creates the chain of events that led a group of people to seek refuge on an exposed strip of land in the sea. He chronicles the dramatic course of the hurricane itself, as seen through the eyes of a diverse cast of real-life characters, including eighteen-year-old Emma Mille, her French father, a steamboat captain, a pastor, and a slave. Island in a Storm is the story of their bravery and cowardice, luck and misfortune, life and death.
At the heart of this narrative lies another, equally compelling, story. Sallenger, an oceanographer, traces the insidious link between the environmental deaths across the Mississippi delta and the human deaths that occurred when the storm swept ashore. The result is a fascinating portrait of a coast in perpetual motion and a rising sea that made the Isle Derniere particularly vulnerable to a great hurricane.
Ultimately, Island in a Storm is a cautionary environmental tale. Global warming is spreading the unique hazards of river deltas to coasts around the world, and the signs of what happened to Isle Derniere may soon be appearing on other islands. The account of this nineteenth-century disaster and its aftermath offers a vital historical lesson as we continue to develop precarious coastal locations whose vulnerability will only grow as sea levels rise across the globe.
The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini; 400 pp
An epic tale of fathers and sons, of friendship and betrayal, that takes us from Afghanistan in the final days of the monarchy to the atrocities of the present.
The unforgettable, heartbreaking story of the unlikely friendship between a wealthy boy and the son of his father’s servant, “The Kite Runner” is a beautifully crafted novel set in a country that is in the process of being destroyed. It is about the power of reading, the price of betrayal, and the possibility of redemption, and it is also about the power of fathers over sons-their love, their sacrifices, their lies.
The first Afghan novel to be written in English, The Kite Runner tells a sweeping story of family, love, and friendship against a backdrop of history that has not been told in fiction before, bringing to mind the large canvases of the Russian writers of the nineteenth century. But just as it is old-fashioned in its narration, it is contemporary in its subject-the devastating history of Afghanistan over the last thirty years. As emotionally gripping as it is tender, The Kite Runner is an unusual and powerful debut.
The Last Madam: A Life in the New Orleans Underworld by Christine Wiltz; 288 pp
In 1916, at age fifteen, Norma Wallace arrived in New Orleans. Sexy and shrewd, she quickly went from streetwalker to madam and by 1920 had opened what became a legendary house of prostitution. There she entertained a steady stream of governors, gangsters, and movie stars until she was arrested at last in 1962. Shortly before she died in 1974, she tape-recorded her memories-the scandalous stories of a powerful woman who had the city’s politicians in her pocket and whose lovers included the twenty-five-year-old boy next door, whom she married when she was sixty-four. Combining those tapes with original research, Christine Wiltz chronicles not just Norma’s rise and fall but also the social history of New Orleans, thick with the vice and corruption that flourished there-and, like Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil and Philistines at the Hedgerow, resurrects a vanished secret world.
* Letters from New Orleans by Rob Walker; 220 pp
In January of 2000, Rob Walker left a high-powered media job in New York, and with his girlfriend, moved to New Orleans. Letters from New Orleans collects, in one volume, the delightful and unsettling observations Walker sent to friends and fans about his intriguing new life in New Orleans.
Life as We Knew It by Susan Beth Pfeffer; 360 pp
Miranda’s disbelief turns to fear in a split second when an asteroid knocks the moon closer to the earth. How should her family prepare for the future when worldwide tsunamis wipe out the coasts, earthquakes rock the continents, and volcanic ash blocks out the sun? As summer turns to Arctic winter, Miranda, her two brothers, and their mother retreat to the unexpected safe haven of their sunroom, where they subsist on stockpiled food and limited water in the warmth of a wood-burning stove. In her journal, Miranda records the events of each desperate day, while she and her family struggle to hold on to their most priceless resource–hope.
Life in the Wake: Fiction from Post-Katrina New Orleans by NOLAFugees.com; 276 pp
Featuring the work of prominent New Orleans literary personalities such as: Amanda Anderson, Jason Berry, Berman Black, Andrea Boll, Justin Burnell, Tara Jill Ciccarone, Lucas Diaz-Medina, Joel Farrelly, Ken Foster, Patty Friedmann, Kelly Gartman, Anne Gisleson, Dana Harrison-Tidwell, Sarah K. Inman, Leonard Earl Johnson, Karissa Kary, Jennifer Kuchta, Kris Lackey, Bill Lavender, Bill Loehfelm, Ed Skoog, Katie Walenter.
Liquor: A Novel by Poppy Z. Brite; 352 pp
New Orleans natives Rickey and G-man are lifetime friends and down-and-out line cooks desperate to make a quick buck. When Rickey concocts the idea of opening a restaurant in their alcohol-loving hometown where every dish packs a spirited punch, they know they’re on their way to the bank. With some wheeling and dealing, a slew of great recipes, and a few lucky breaks, Rickey and G-man are soon on their way to opening Liquor, their very own restaurant. But first they need to pacify a local crank who doesn’t want to see his neighborhood disturbed, sidestep Rickey’s deranged ex-boss, rein in their big-mouth silent partner before he runs amok, and stay afloat in a stew of corruption in a town well known for its bottom feeders.
A manic, spicy romp through the kitchens, back alleys, dive bars, and drug deals of the country’s most sublimely ridiculous city, author Poppy Z. Brite masterfully shakes equal parts ambition, scandal, ?lé powder, cocaine, and murder, and serves Liquor straight up, with a twist.
The Listener by Taylor Caldwell; 292 pp
The Long Ride by Students at the Center
For more information on Students at the Center, visit: http://www.strom.clemson.edu/teams/literacy/sac/
Louis Armstrong’s New Orleans by Thomas Brothers; 400 pp
In the early twentieth century, New Orleans was a place of colliding identities and histories, and Louis Armstrong was a gifted young man of psychological nimbleness. A dark-skinned, impoverished child, he grew up under low expectations, Jim Crow legislation, and vigilante terrorism. Yet he also grew up at the center of African American vernacular traditions from the Deep South, learning the ecstatic music of the Sanctified Church, blues played by street musicians, and the plantation tradition of ragging a tune.
Louis Armstrong’s New Orleans interweaves a searching account of early twentieth-century New Orleans with a narrative of the first twenty-one years of Armstrong’s life. Drawing on a stunning body of first-person accounts, this book tells the rags-to-riches tale of Armstrong’s early life and the social and musical forces that shaped him. The city and the musician are both extraordinary, their relationship unique, and their impact on American culture incalculable.
M by Michael Aro; 380 pp
M is Michael Aro’s dark, satirical commentary on our twenty-first century global monoculture of capitalism, technology and entertainment. It presents the stories of a bookstore clerk, a five-dimensional alien, a cabal of nine individuals who control the world’s political, socio-economic, and religious institutions, an orphan genius, a group of monks on a sand mandala tour, and Artificial Intelligences modeled after Tesla, Nietzche, Erasmus, Joan of Arc and Barbie. The result is a devastatingly funny critique of contemporary civilization.
The Moon in the Mango Tree by Pamela Ewen; 480 pp
Set in Siam and Europe during the 1920s, a glittering decade of change, The Moon in the Mango Tree is based upon the true story of Barbara Bond, a beautiful young opera singer from Philadelphia who is forced to choose between her fierce desire for independence—a desire to create something of her own to give purpose and meaning to her life—and a deep abiding love for her faithful missionary husband whose work creates a gap between them. But when you choose between two things you love, must one be lost forever?
More Bible Crafts on a Shoestring Budget; 96 pp
Make Bible Crafts effective, not expensive, by using common household items! Each craft includes a Bible lesson, step-by-step instructions, and patterns. For ages 5-10.
The Moviegoer by Walker Percy; 256 pp
Binx Bolling is s small-time stockbroker who lives quietly in suburban New Orleans, pursuing an interest in the movies, affairs with his secretaries, and living out his days. But soon he finds himself on a “search” for something more important, something that will measure and mark and hold his life forever against the passage of time. And one fateful Mardi Gras week, he finds it in a way, and with a woman, he would never have expected….
Moving to Higher Ground: How Jazz Can Change Your Life by Wynton Marsalis; 208 pp
In this beautiful book, the Pulitzer Prize-winning musician and composer Wynton Marsalis explores jazz and how an understanding of it can lead to deeper, more original ways of being, living, and relating-for individuals, communities, and nations. Marsalis shows us how to listen to jazz, and through stories about his life and the lessons he has learned from other music greats, he reveals how the central ideas in jazz can influence the way people think and even how they behave with others, changing self, family, and community for the better. At the heart of jazz is the expression of personality and individuality, coupled with an ability to listen to and improvise with others. Jazz as an art–and as a way to move people and nations to higher ground–is at the core of this unique, illuminating, and inspiring book, a master class on jazz and life by a brilliant American artist.
Myths to Live By by Joseph Campbell & Johnson Fairchild; 288 pp
The brilliant author of The Masks of God shares his ideas and speculations on our universal myths, in a fascinating, very personal work which explores the enduring power of the myths that influence our lives and examines the myth-making process from the primitive past to the immediate present.
Natalie Scott: A Magnificent Life by John Scott; 496 pp
Natalie Vivian Scott was once described by author Sherwood Anderson as “the best newspaperwoman in America.” She became a vital force in the creative salon of intellectuals who gathered in the French Quarter during the 1920s. This was a time that saw the reawakening of this original section of New Orleans life, thanks to the efforts of Scott and her colleagues. She was widely recognized as a literary and cultural dynamo of the early twentieth century; however, her accomplishments can hardly be pigeonholed into these two categories. As a Red Cross nurse and translator during World War’s I and II, Scott was awarded the Croix de Guerre, France’s highest medal for bravery. She received this medal after rescuing patients from the continuously bombed and debris-filled upper floors of the medical building she worked in. Scott was a celebrated writer and journalist in Mexico and the United States. Opening the Kitigawa House, a pension for artists and writers in Mexico, she continued her literary influence. Her indomitable and charitable spirit led her to create a peasant school and medical cooperative in impoverished Taxco, Mexico, where she lived until her death in 1957. This incredible account of her passions, causes, and adventures is one of a real New Orleans lady-a lady whose comfort in the role of a Southern woman belied the adventurous and varied life she led.
John W. Scott received his Ph.D. in history from Louisiana State University and later became an assistant professor of history there. He has won the Louisiana Historical Association Presidential Memorial Award and the Martin Hardwick Award for Writing. He became interested in this subject while a student at Tulane University. The university’s extensive archives, files, and artifacts became the catapult for his interest in accurately and thoroughly documenting the robust life of Natalie Scott. Also an attorney, he received a J.D. from LSU and served several terms in the State Legislature.
New Orleans: A Cultural History by Louise McKinney; 272 pp
Founded in 1718 by two French-Canadian brothers for French King Louis XIV, New Orleans grew from its roots as a Euro-Caribbean port city at the nexus of North, Central and South America. Situated at the bottom of the Mississippi River Delta, the city became “Paris on the Mississippi,” the fashionable cultural capital of the American South, home to America’s first opera house and birthplace of jazz. Many think of New Orleans, with its antebellum mansions, above-ground cemeteries and ghostly moss-bearded oaks as a haunted place. It is certainly the most un-American of American cities, creating its own laid-back “Big Easy” attitude from the customs of the people who founded it: French and Spanish colonists, gens de couleur libres, Northern adventurers, riverboat men, pirates, and Cajuns. From this eclectic mix of influences has evolved a distinctive Creole culture, expressed in language, architecture and cuisine. Louise McKinney explores the soul of this deeply spiritual and hedonistic place, where every year the pre-Lenten Mardi Gras bursts forth with outrageous excess.
New Orleans City Guide 1938 by Works Progress Administration; 430 pp
In 1938, under the direction of novelist and historian Lyle Saxon, The Federal Writers’ Project of the Works Progress Administration produced this delightfully detailed portrait of New Orleans. Containing recipes, photographs and folklore, it is consistently hailed as one of the best books produced about the city. Remarkably, many of the sites and attractions the WPA chronicled in 1938 are still around today.
* New Orleans Goes to the Movies: Film Sites in the French Quarter and Beyond by Alan T. Leonhard; 272 pp
Elvis Presley invites us to his world of King Creole, Ingrid Bergman strolls with us through the French Market in Saratoga Trunk, and Blanche DuBois takes us for a ride on the Streetcar Named Desire. Twenty classic films set in New Orleans and at least partly shot there are discussed by author and movie buff Alan Leonhard. Written with a passion for the films and their New Orleans connection by Leonhard, the book is also beautifully illustrated with pen and ink drawings. Includes guided tours through the French Quarter and on the St. Charles streetcar to see actual filming locations and a list of all movies set in New Orleans. Bibliography and index make this book a great reference work.
New Orleans Noir by Julie Smith (Editor); 270 pp
Brand-new stories by: Thomas Adcock, Ace Atkins, Patty Friedmann, David Fulmer, Barbara Hambly, Greg Herren, Laura Lippman, Tim McLoughlin, James Nolan, Ted O’Brien, Eric Overmyer, Jeri Cain Rossi, Maureen Tan, Jervey Tervalon, Olympia Vernon, Christine Wiltz, Kalamu Ya Salaam, and Julie Smith.
New Orleans, Mon Amour: 20 Years of Writings from The City by Andrei Codrescu; 224 pp
For two decades NPR commentator Andrei Codrescu has been living in and writing about his adopted city, where, as he puts it, the official language is dreams. How apt that a refugee born in Transylvania found his home in a place where vampires roam the streets and voodoo queens live around the corner; where cemeteries are the most popular picnic spots, the ghosts of poets, prostitutes, and pirates are palpable, and in the French Quarter, no one ever sleeps.
Codrescu’s essays have been called “satirical gems,” “subversive,” “sardonic and stunning,” “funny,” “gonzo,” “wittily poignant,” and “perverse”-here is a writer who perfectly mirrors the wild, voluptuous, bohemian character of New Orleans itself. This retrospective follows him from newcomer to near native: first seduced by the lush banana trees in his backyard and the sensual aroma of coffee at the café down the block, Codrescu soon becomes a Window Gang regular at the infamous bar Molly’s on Decatur, does a stint as King of Krewe de Vieux Carré at Mardi Gras, befriends artists, musicians, and eccentrics, and exposes the city’s underbelly of corruption, warning presciently about the lack of planning for floods in a city high on its own insouciance. Alas, as we all now know, Paradise is lost.
New Orleans, Mon Amour is an epic love song, a clear-eyed elegy, a cultural celebration, and a thank-you note to New Orleans in its Golden Age.
The Next Step in the Dance: A Novel by Tim Gautreaux; 352 pp
Bringing the same light and gentle understanding that he did to the story collection Same Place, Same Things, author Tim Gautreaux tells the tale of Paul and Colette, star-crossed and factious lovers struggling to make it in rural south Louisiana. When Colette, fed up with small town life, perceives yet another indiscretion by the fun-loving Paul, she heads for Los Angeles, with big dreams and Paul in tow. Paul’s attempts to draw his beautiful young wife back home to the Cajun bayou, and back to his heart, make up a tale filled with warmth, devotion and majestically constructed scenes of Southern life.
* Nine Lives: Death and Life in New Orleans by Dan Baum; 352 pp
The hidden history of a haunted and beloved city told through the intersecting lives of nine remarkable characters
After Hurricane Katrina, Dan Baum moved to New Orleans to write about the city’s response to the disaster for “The” “New Yorker.” He quickly realized that Katrina was not the most interesting thing about New Orleans, not by a long shot. The most interesting question, which struck him as he watched residents struggling to return, was this: Why are New Orleanians–along with people from all over the world who continue to flock there–so devoted to a place that was, even before the storm, the most corrupt, impoverished, and violent corner of America?
Here’s the answer. Nine Lives is a multivoiced biography of this dazzling, surreal, and imperiled city through the lives of nine characters over forty years and bracketed by two epic storms: Hurricane Betsy, which transformed the city in the 1960′s, and Katrina, which nearly destroyed it. These nine lives are windows into every strata of one of the most complex and fascinating cities in the world. From outsider artists and Mardi Gras Kings to jazz-playing coroners and transsexual barkeeps, these lives are possible only in New Orleans, but the city that nurtures them is also, from the beginning, a city haunted by the possibility of disaster. All their stories converge in the storm, where some characters rise to acts of heroism and others sink to the bottom. But it is New Orleans herself–perpetually whistling past the grave yard–that is the story’s real heroine.
Nine Lives is narrated from the points of view of some of New Orleans’s most charismatic characters, but underpinning the voices of the city is an extraordinary feat of reporting that allows Baum to bring this kaleidoscopic portrait to life with brilliant color and crystalline detail. Readers will find themselves wrapped up in each of these individual dramas and delightfully immersed in the life of one of this country’s last unique places, even as its ultimate devastation looms ever closer. By resurrecting this beautiful and tragic place and portraying the extraordinary lives that could have taken root only there, Nine Lives shows us what was lost in the storm and what remains to be saved.
Not Just the Levees Broke:My Live Before and After Katrina by Phyllis Montana-LeBlanc; 240 pp
Called “one of the rawest specimens of classic Nawlins spitfire you’ll ever find” by Newsweek, and featured in Spike Lee’s HBO documentary When the Levees Broke, Phyllis Montana-Leblanc gives an astounding and poignant account of how she and her husband lived through one of our nation’s worst disasters, and continue to put their lives back together.
New Orleans Hurricane Katrina survivor Phyllis Leblanc reveals moment by moment the impending doom she and her family experienced during one of the greatest disasters in contemporary American history. The initial weather forecast, the public warnings from officials, and then the increasingly devastating developments — the winds and rain, the rising waters — Not Just the Levees Broke begs the question, What would you do in a life-and-death situation with your family and neighbors facing the ultimate test of character?
Not Just the Levees Broke is a portrayal of the human spirit at its best — the generosity of family, neighbors, and strangers; the depth of love that one can hold for another; the power to help and heal others.
Nothing But Love: A Katrina Volunteer Finds Inspiration In The Aftermath by J. Baker Young; 256 pp
It is the only county in United States history to be completely destroyed by a disaster. But the residents of St. Bernard Parish refused to be defeated. One Katrina volunteer tells the story of a community that came back to life against all odds: “As volunteers we were privileged to witness their strength through the toughest of times. In St. Bernard Parish dignity and compassion, humor and hospitality were still going strong. And if these residents could maintain their goodness under these circumstances, maybe we could too if disaster ever visited us.”
The Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals by Michael Pollan; 450 pp
A New York Times bestseller that has changed the way readers view the ecology of eating, this revolutionary book by award winner Michael Pollan asks the seemingly simple question: What should we have for dinner? Tracing from source to table each of the food chains that sustain us – whether industrial or organic, alternative or processed – he develops a portrait of the American way of eating. The result is a sweeping, surprising exploration of the hungers that have shaped our evolution, and of the profound implications our food choices have for the health of our species and the future of our planet.
One D.O.A., One on the Way: A Novel by Mary Robison; 176 pp
From the house author and long-time favorite “writer’s writer,” the effortlessly smart, deliriously off-kilter story of an extended New Orleans family trying to reclaim a shadow of their former selves.
Mary Robison, author of Why Did I Ever-winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Fiction, a New York Times Notable Book, and Book Sense 76 Pick- has written a new novel that is certain to gather as much attention and wild acclaim.
The story opens on Jay, a location scout for a movie production company. It’s the easiest job in the world; at the end of the day, she says, they should just ask her how it went and say “Super. Sounds like you had a good time.” She is complacently married to Alt, who has just been diagnosed with a grave illness and gone back to his palatial family home, back to the care of his parents. Which is just fine with Jay-or so she tells herself at the start. But standing left of center of this still prosperous but mortally wounded family does not get easier as the weeks wear on. As she tries to negotiate her way around the anger of Saunders, Alt’s despised twin brother; maintain her friendship with Petal, his beautiful wife; and protect what’s left of the innocence of Collie, the niece caught in the middle, Jay finds more than the Louisiana heat getting to be oppressive.
With her trademark biting humor and breathtaking facility with language, Mary Robison thus sets the stage for a beguiling Southern Gothic sure to delight both her fanatical following and new readers alike.
Overcoming Katrina: African American Voices from the Crescent City and Beyond by D’Ann R. Penner and Keith C. Ferdinand; 288 pp
Overcoming Katrina tells the stories of 27 New Orleanians as they fought to survive Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath. Their oral histories offer first-hand experiences: three days on a roof with Navy veteran Leonard Smith; at the convention center with waitress Eleanor Thornton; and with Willie Pitford, an elevator man, as he rescued 150 people in New Orleans East. Overcoming approaches the question of why New Orleans matters, from perspectives of the individuals who lived, loved, worked, and celebrated life and death there prior to being scattered across the country by Hurricane Katrina. This book’s twenty-seven narrators range from Mack Slan, a conservative businessman who disparages the younger generation for not sharing his ability to make “good, rational decisions,” to Kalamu ya Salaam, who was followed by the New Orleans Police Department for several years as a militant defender of Black Power in the late 1960s and ’70s. These narratives are memorials to the corner stores, the Baptist churches, the community health clinics, and those streets where the aunties stood on the corner, and whose physical traces have now all been washed away. They conclude with visions of a safer, equitably rebuilt New Orleans.
Oyster: A Novel by John Biguenet; 304 pp
With comparisons to Flaubert, Chekhov, and Faulkner, O. Henry Award-winner John Biguenet earned wide acclaim for his debut short-story collection, The Torturer’s Apprentice. In his astonishing first novel, Oyster, he demonstrates the same mastery of craft and rigor of vision that led critics across the country to join Robert Olen Butler in praising this “important new writer.”
Set on the Louisiana coast in 1957, Oyster recounts the engrossing tale of a deadly rivalry between two families. To avoid ruin after years of declining oyster crops, Felix and Mathilde Petitjean offer their young daughter, Therese, in marriage to 52-year-old Horse Bruneau, who holds the papers on their boat and house. Bruneau has spent his life as Felix’s rival for both the Petitjeans’ century-old oyster beds and, as we learn, Mathilde. But as Therese explains to Horse one night as they float in a pirogue alone in the marsh, “I don’t get bought for the price of no damn boat.”
The spiraling violence of Oyster and the seething passions behind it drive an unpredictable tale of murder and revenge in which two women and the men who desire them play out a drama as elemental and inexorable as a Greek tragedy.
Painting Katrina by Phil Sandusky; 96 pp
Phil Sandusky is a nationally renowned plein air artist known for his cityscapes, particularly those of New Orleans. In the immediate aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, Sandusky returned home, postponing repairs to his own damaged house in order to begin recording the devastation in his beloved city. The result is a collection of work that offers a vision of the beauty and fragility of New Orleans and displays the awesome power of nature. The book contains color reproductions of seventy-six of Sandusky’s paintings: thirty created a year before Katrina, depicting New Orleans in better times; thirty in the immediate aftermath of the storm, focusing primarily on scenes of devastation at the lakefront and the Lower Ninth Ward; and the last sixteen painted approximately one year after Katrina, showing both the city’s painstaking recovery and nature’s reclamation of parts of New Orleans. Sandusky prefaces the paintings with background about his style and a compelling journal chronicling his experience exploring and capturing the hurricane devastation.
* The Parade Goes On Without You by Andrea Boll; 151 pp
Luna met Blue at the secondline; he played bass drum and she danced behind him. The Parade Goes On Without You follows their lives through the streets of New Orleans. For Luna, Blue’s world opens up to her, and gradually she discovers her true place in it.
Andrea Boll grew up in San Diego, California. She is a graduate of the University of California at Berkeley and received her MFA from the University of New Orleans. Andrea and her daughter live in the Gentilly neighborhood of New Orleans, eight feet below sea level. She is a regular contributor for the online magazine NOLAFugees and is a professor of English at Dillard University.
Passing Unseen: Stories from New Domangue by Lucas Díaz-Medina; 164 pp
I settled into this strange place, it seemed, as much as Lorenzo did, almost immediately that first summer. We quickly grew accustomed to our new home. We had constant running water and electricity, and we had a color television that could pick up twelve channels, and even had our very own bedroom, which we shared with bunk beds. We lived on a quiet street in New Domangue where there weren’t too many other people like us, but this didn’t bother Lorenzo and me because we had each other wherever we went. Father, who often spoke about New Domangue being our new home in the same breath that he reminded us of Santo Domingo, would sometimes point to the things in our home and say that one day we will have these things back in La República. As soon as the country gets better, he would say, we will go back and live like wealthy people. But the old world back home disappeared to Lorenzo and me very quickly, and the old neighborhood and our old friends faded into sketchy snapshots that we barely bothered to look over. We were busy exploring every new discovery that came our way…
Pistol: The Life of Pete Maravich by Mark Kriegel; 400 pp
Pistol is more than the biography of a ballplayer. It’s the stuff of classic novels: the story of a boy transformed by his father’s dream — and the cost of that dream. Even as Pete Maravich became Pistol Pete — a basketball icon for baby boomers — all the Maraviches paid a price. Now acclaimed author Mark Kriegel has brilliantly captured the saga of an American family: its rise, its apparent ruin, and, finally, its redemption.
Almost four decades have passed since Maravich entered the national consciousness as basketball’s boy wizard. No one had ever played the game like the kid with the floppy socks and shaggy hair. And all these years later, no one else ever has. The idea of Pistol Pete continues to resonate with young people today just as powerfully as it did with their fathers.
In averaging 44.2 points a game at Louisiana State University, he established records that will never be broken. But even more enduring than the numbers was the sense of ecstasy and artistry with which he played. With the ball in his hands, Maravich had a singular power to inspire awe, inflict embarrassment, or even tell a joke.
But he wasn’t merely a mesmerizing showman. He was basketball’s answer to Elvis, a white Southerner who sold Middle America on a black man’s game. Like Elvis, he paid a terrible price, becoming a prisoner of his own fame.
Set largely in the South, Kriegel’s Pistol, a tale of obsession and basketball, fathers and sons, merges several archetypal characters. Maravich was a child prodigy, a prodigal son, his father’s ransom in a Faustian bargain, and a Great White Hope. But he was also a creature of contradictions: always the outsider but a virtuoso in a team sport, an exuberant showman who wouldn’t look you in the eye, a vegetarian boozer, an athlete who lived like a rock star, a suicidal genius saved by Jesus Christ.
A renowned biographer — People magazine called him “a master” — Kriegel renders his subject with a style that is, by turns, heartbreaking, lyrical, and electric.
The narrative begins in 1929, the year a missionary gave Pete’s father a basketball. Press Maravich had been a neglected child trapped in a hellish industrial town, but the game enabled him to blossom. It also caused him to confuse basketball with salvation. The intensity of Press’s obsession initiates a journey across three generations of Maraviches. Pistol Pete, a ballplayer unlike any other, was a product of his father’s vanity and vision. But that dream continues to exact a price on Pete’s own sons. Now in their twenties — and fatherless for most of their lives — they have waged their own struggles with the game and its ghosts.
Pistol is an unforgettable biography. By telling one family’s history, Kriegel has traced the history of the game and a large slice of the American narrative.
Plenty Enough Suck to Go Around by Cheryl Wagner; 224 pp
Print and public-radio journalist Wagner describes rebuilding after Hurricane Katrina…Despite Kafkaesque experiences with the infamous bureaucratic mess that threatened to undo New Orleans once and for all, the couple held on to their optimism for the city and their little piece of it. Wagner captures the nostalgia, the heartbreak and the friendships spawned in Katrina’s turbulent aftermath with raw emotional honesty free of sentimentality. Unflinching, humorous and heartfelt.
The Post-American World by Fareed Zakaria; 304 pp
This is not a book about the decline of America, but rather about the rise of everyone else.” So begins Fareed Zakaria’s blockbusting bestseller on the United States in the twenty-first century. How can Americans understand this rapidly changing international climate, and how might the nation continue to thrive in a truly global era? Zakaria answers these questions with his customary lucidity, insight, and imagination.
The Rapture by Michael Aro; 260 pp
It’s the end of the world, the apocalypse has come. The Rapture is Michael Aro’s dark, satirical view of the end of the world. Terminus Est Near, the end is near and our world is bleak. Aro shows us what happens when apocalyptic events start to shape our future. When faith and religion collide with fear and panic that’s when we truly see who we are and it only happens in the end times. It’s an epic book and breath taking until the last page. The Rapture is Michael Aro’s dark and poignant novel of the end times without the religious rhetoric of apocalyptic books, but still leaving readers with one question – what will we do when the end is near. It’s a must read for any Michael Aro fan.
Rising Tide: The Great Mississippi Flood of 1927 and How It Changed America by John Barry; 528 pp
An American epic of science, politics, race, honor, high society, and the Mississippi River, Rising Tide tells the riveting and nearly forgotten story of the greatest natural disaster this country has ever known — the Mississippi flood of 1927. The river inundated the homes of nearly one million people, helped elect Huey Long governor and made Herbert Hoover president, drove hundreds of thousands of blacks north, and transformed American society and politics forever.
The Safety of Secrets by Delaune Michel; 320 pp
“Now we’re just alike.” So begins Fiona and Patricia’s friendship that warm autumn morning in first grade in Lake Charles, Louisiana, their bond forged ever closer by Fiona’s abusive mother and Patricia’s neglectful one. Their relationship is a source of continuity and strength through their move to L.A. to become actresses; through Fiona’s marriage and Patricia’s sudden fame. When husband and career pressures exact a toll, the women wonder if their friendship can survive. Then a dark secret from their past emerges, threatening to destroy not only their bond, but all they’ve worked for as well.
The Safety of Secrets is a beautifully written exploration of the bonds forged in childhood and challenged decades later, of the fulfillment of dreams and the damage they can cause, and of secrets being uncovered and the truth we find inside.
Same Place, Same Things: Stories by Tim Gautreaux; 224 pp
Set largely in rural Louisiana, Tim Gautreaux’s masterful debut story collection follows men and women whose ordinary lives reach a point of rupture, a moment when convention gives way to crisis and everything changes: A drunken train engineer charges toward disaster, a father borrows and old airplane to chase down his daughter’s kidnapper, a young man falls in love with a voice on the radio. Written with humor, suspense, and a powerful affection for humanity in all its wild forms, Same Place, Same Things is the first great work by a master of the form.
* Sandrine’s Letter to Tomorrow by Dedra Johnson; 220 pp
Despite being a straight-A student and voracious reader, eight-year old Sandrine Miller is treated as little more than a servant by her mother, who forces Sandrine to clean house, do chores and take care of her younger half sister, Yolanda. On top of the despair of her life at home, Sandrine must confront growing up against the harshness of life in 1970s-era New Orleans, where men in cars follow her home from school and she is ostracized because she is a light-skinned black girl. The only refuge Sandrine has against her bleak world is spending summers with her beloved grandmother, Mamalita. After Mamalita’s death, Sandrine realizes that she must escape from her mother, from New Orleans, from everything she has known, if she is to have any kind of future.
* A Season of Night: New Orleans Life After Katrina by Ian McNulty; 176 pp
For many months after Hurricane Katrina, life in New Orleans meant negotiating streets strewn with debris and patrolled by the United States Army. Most of the city was without power. Emptied and ruined houses, businesses, schools, and churches stretched for miles through once thriving neighborhoods.
Almost immediately, however, die-hard New Orleanians began a homeward journey. A travelogue through this surreal landscape, A Season of Night: New Orleans Life after Katrina offers a deeply intimate, firsthand account of that homecoming. After the floodwaters drained, author Ian McNulty returned to live on the second floor of his wrecked house without electricity or neighbors. For months his sanity was writing this book on a laptop by candlelight.
By turns haunting, inspiring, and darkly comic, this memoir offers a behind-the-headlines story of resilience and renewal. From bittersweet camaraderie in the wreckage to depression and violent rampages in the lawless night to the first flickers of cultural revival and the explosive joy of a post-Katrina Mardi Gras, A Season of Night delivers an unprecedented tale from the wounded but always enthralling Crescent City.
Set in Motion by Valerie Martin; 224 pp
The startling arrival of Valerie Martin’s first novel brought rave reviews and sounded the themes that would inform such later major works as MARY REILLY, THE GREAT DIVORCE, and SALVATION: the fragility of the physical world, the gritty details of employment, and the possibilities, however slim, of transformation and liberty. Helene Thatcher, the young woman narrator of SET IN MOTION, works–not at the academic post to which she once aspired, but in the welfare offices of the city of New Orleans, a world of bureaucratic forms, files, bad air-conditioning, and departmental regulations. The chaos and despair that rile the lives of the people Helene serves are mirrored in her own life on the trendier side of town. Her lovers are given to casual violence and drugs; a friend toys, seductively, with sanity. Detached, erotic, Helene is a young heroine who is coping, barely.
Showdown in Desire: The Black Panthers Take a Stand in New Orleans by Orissa Arend; 320 pp
Showdown in Desire portrays the Black Panther Party in New Orleans in 1970, a year that included a shootout with the police on Piety Street, the creation of survival programs, and the daylong standoff between the Panthers and the police in the Desire housing development. Through interviews with Malik Rahim, the Panther; Robert H. King, Panther and member of the Angola 3; Larry Preston Williams, the black policeman; Moon Landrieu, the mayor; Henry Faggen, the Desire resident; Robert Glass, the white lawyer; Jerome LeDoux, the black priest; William Barnwell, the white priest; and many others, Orissa Arend tells a nuanced story that unfolds amid guns, tear gas, desperate poverty, oppression, and inflammatory rhetoric to capture the palpable spirit of rebellion, resistance, and revolution of an incendiary summer in New Orleans.
Slow Way Home by Michael Morris; 308 pp
On the surface, Brandon Willard seems like your average eight-year-old boy. He loves his mama, peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, and G. I. Joe. But Brandon’s life is anything but typical.
Wise beyond his years, Brandon understands he’s the only one in this world he can count on. It’s an outlook that serves him well the day his mama leaves him behind at the Raleigh bus station and sets off to Canada with “her destiny” — the latest man that she hopes will bring her happiness. The day his mother leaves, Brandon takes the first step toward shaping his own destiny. Soon he sends himself spending pleasant days playing with his cousins on his grandparents’ farm and trying to forget the past. In the safety of that place, Brandon finally is able to trust the love of an adult to help iron out the wiry places until his nerves are as steady as any other boy’s.
But when Sophie Willard shows up a year later with a determined look in her eye and a new man in tow, Brandon’s grandparents ignore a judge’s ruling and flee the state with Brandon. Creating a new life and identity in a small Florida town, Brandon meets the people who will fill him with self-worth and self-respect. He slowly becomes involved with “God’s Hospital,” a church run by the gregarious Sister Delores, a woman who is committed to a life of service for all members of the community, black and white, regardless of some townsfolk’s disapproval.
* The Soul is Bulletproof by NOLAFugees; 300 pp
Down here in New Orleans, 2007 began with thousands of spirited citizens marching on City Hall to protest the rising wave of violent crime in the city; it ended with hundreds of public housing advocates getting pepper sprayed, tasered, and locked out of the City Council chambers. In between, over 200 people were murdered. NOLAFugees.com, the internet magazine that chronicled one year after Hurricane Katrina with “Year Zero: A Year of Reporting from Post-Katrina New Orleans,” returns to chronicle the city’s fledgling recovery. “Soul Is Bulletproof: Reports from Reconstruction New Orleans” features the work of 23 writers and a mix of investigative journalism, first-person reportage, political analysis, and vicious satire, all of which serves to reveal New Orleans–with its uneasy race relations, its shadowy visionaries, its struggling citizens– as a city of profound uncertainty.
* The Sound of Building Coffins by Louis Maistros; 360 pp
It is 1891 in New Orleans, and young Typhus Morningstar cycles under the light of the half-moon to fulfill his calling, rebirthing aborted fetuses in the fecund waters of the Mississippi River. He cannot know that nearby, events are unfolding that will change his life forever — events that were set in motion by a Vodou curse gone wrong, forty years before he was born.
In the humble home of Sicilian immigrants, a one-year-old boy has been possessed by a demon. His father dead, lynched by a mob, his distraught mother at her wits’ end, this baby who yesterday could only crawl and gurgle is now walking, dancing, and talking — in a voice impossibly deep. The doctor has fled, and several men of the cloth have come and gone, including Typhus’ father, warned off directly by the clear voice of his Savior. A newspaper man, shamed by the part he played in inciting the lynch mob that cost this boy his father, appalled by what he sees, goes in search of help.
Seven will be persuaded, will try to help…and all seven will be profoundly affected by what takes place in that one-room house that dark night. Not all will leave alive, and all will be irrevocably changed by this demonic struggle, and by the sound of the first notes blown of a new musical form: jazz.
Meticulously-drawn in lyrical prose, this tale of death and rebirth, devastation and redemption, will draw you into a world of beauty and pain, as alluring as it is dangerous.
Through Black Spruce by Joseph Boyden; 368 pp
Will Bird is a legendary Cree bush pilot, now lying in a coma in a hospital in his hometown of Moose Factory, Ontario. His niece Annie Bird, beautiful and self-reliant, has returned from her own perilous journey to sit beside his bed. Broken in different ways, the two take silent communion in their unspoken kinship, and the story that unfolds is rife with heartbreak, fierce love, ancient blood feuds, mysterious disappearances, fires, plane crashes, murders, and the bonds that hold a family, and a people, together. As Will and Annie reveal their secrets-the tragic betrayal that cost Will his family, Annie’s desperate search for her missing sister, the famous model Suzanne-a remarkable saga of resilience and destiny takes shape. From the dangerous bush country of upper Canada to the drug-fueled glamour of the Manhattan club scene, Joseph Boyden tracks his characters with a keen eye for the telling detail and a rare empathy for the empty places concealed within the heart. Sure to appeal to readers of Louise Erdrich and Jim Harrison, Through Black Spruce establishes Boyden as a writer of startling originality and uncommon power.
* Twilight by Stephenie Meyer; 336 pp
Bella Swan’s move to Forks, a small, perpetually rainy town in Washington, could have been the most boring move she ever made. But once she meets the mysterious and alluring Edward Cullen, Bella’s life takes a thrilling and terrifying turn. Up until now, Edward has managed to keep his vampire identity a secret in the small community he lives in, but now nobody is safe, especially Bella, the person Edward holds most dear.
Deeply romantic and extraordinarily suspenseful, Twilight captures the struggle between defying our instincts and satisfying our desires. This is a love story with bite.
White Oleander by Janet Fitch; 480 pp
Astrid is the only child of a single mother, Ingrid, a brilliant, obsessed poet who wields her luminous beauty to intimidate and manipulate men. Astrid worships her mother and cherishes their private world full of ritual and mystery-but their idyll is shattered when Astrid’s mother falls apart over a lover.
Deranged by rejection, Ingrid murders the man, and is sentenced to life in prison. White Oleander is the unforgettable story of Astrid’s journey through a series of foster homes and her efforts to find a place for herself in impossible circumstances. Each home is its own universe, with a new set of laws and lessons to be learned. With determination and humor, Astrid confronts the challenges of loneliness and poverty, and strives to learn who a motherless child in an indifferent world can become. Tough, irrepressible, funny, and warm, Astrid is one of the most indelible characters in recent fiction. White Oleander is an unforgettable story of mothers and daughters, burgeoning sexuality, the redemptive powers of art, and the unstoppable force of the emergent self. Written with exquisite beauty and grace, this is a compelling debut by an author poised to join the ranks of today’s most gifted novelists.”
Why We Suck: A Feel Good Guide to Staying Fat, Loud, Lazy and Stupid by Denis Leary; 256 pp
One of America’s most original and biting comic satirists, Denis Leary takes on all the poseurs, politicians, and pop culture icons who have sucked in public for far too long. Sparing no one, Leary zeroes in on the ridiculous wherever he finds it-his Irish Catholic upbringing, the folly of celebrity, the pressures of family life, and the great hypocrisy of politics-with the same bright, savage, and profane insight he brought to his critically acclaimed one-man shows No Cure for CancerLock ‘n Load.
Proudly Irish-American, defiantly working class, with a reserve of compassion for the underdog and the overlooked, Leary delivers blistering diatribes that are both penetrating social commentary with no holds barred and laugh-out-loud funny. As always, Leary’s impassioned comic perspective in Why We Suck is right on target.
* The World That Made New Orleans: From Spanish Silver to Congo Square by Ned Sublette; 368 pp
Offering a new perspective on the unique cultural influences of New Orleans, this entertaining history captures the soul of the city and reveals its impact on the rest of the nation. Focused on New Orleans’ first century of existence, a comprehensive, chronological narrative of the political, cultural, and musical development of Louisiana’s early years is presented. This innovative history tracks the important roots of American music back to the swamp town, making clear the effects of centuries-long struggles among France, Spain, and England on the city’s unique culture. The origins of jazz and the city’s eclectic musical influences, including the role of the slave trade, are also revealed. Featuring little known facts about the cultural development of New Orleans—such as the real significance of gumbo, the origins of the tango, and the first appearance of the words vaudeville and voodoo—this rich historical narrative explains how New Orleans’ colonial influences shape the city still today.
World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War by Max Brooks; 352 pp
“The end was near.” -Voices from the Zombie War
The Zombie War came unthinkably close to eradicating humanity. Max Brooks, driven by the urgency of preserving the acid-etched first-hand experiences of the survivors from those apocalyptic years, traveled across the United States of America and throughout the world, from decimated cities that once teemed with upwards of thirty million souls to the most remote and inhospitable areas of the planet. He recorded the testimony of men, women, and sometimes children who came face-to-face with the living, or at least the undead, hell of that dreadful time. World War Z is the result. Never before have we had access to a document that so powerfully conveys the depth of fear and horror, and also the ineradicable spirit of resistance, that gripped human society through the plague years.
Ranging from the now infamous village of New Dachang in the United Federation of China, where the epidemiological trail began with the twelve-year-old Patient Zero, to the unnamed northern forests where untold numbers sought a terrible and temporary refuge in the cold, to the United States of Southern Africa, where the Redeker Plan provided hope for humanity at an unspeakable price, to the west-of-the-Rockies redoubt where the North American tide finally started to turn, this invaluable chronicle reflects the full scope and duration of the Zombie War.
Most of all, the book captures with haunting immediacy the human dimension of this epochal event. Facing the often raw and vivid nature of these personal accounts requires a degree of courage on the part of the reader, but the effort is invaluable because, as Mr. Brooks says in his introduction, “By excluding the human factor, aren’t we risking the kind of personal detachment from history that may, heaven forbid, lead us one day to repeat it? And in the end, isn’t the human factor the only true difference between us and the enemy we now refer to as ‘the living dead’?”
Yellow Jack by Josh Russell; 256 pp
Yellow Jack is a ribald, picaresque trip through an 1840s New Orleans saturated with sex, drugs, death, and corruption. It is the story of Claude Marchand, an apprentice to Louis Daguerre, who discovers the magic art of photography when he hides a broken thermometer in a cabinet and finds that the mercury fumes bring out images etched by the sun in metal plates. After a falling-out with Daguerre, Marchand flees from Paris to New Orleans where he becomes the first daguerrotypist in America and he gets hopelessly entangled with both a voodoo-adept octoroon mistress and the erotically precocious daughter of a prominent New Orleans family. As the city is ravaged each summer by yellow fever (yellow jack), Marchand’s miraculous art is tested by death, politics, and jealousy. Mercury drives him mad, but his work will nevertheless make him immortal, after a fashion.
You Are Where You Eat: Stories and Recipes from the Neighborhoods of New Orleans by Elsa Hahne; 224 pp
Eating and cooking well are not just industries but ways of life for all New Orleans. Writer and photographer Elsa Hahne has visited the kitchens of thirty-three of New Orleans’s home cooks and raconteurs and has served up an expansive smorgasbord inspired by this vibrant city’s love affair with food.
Almost every cultural group that has made its mark on New Orleans is represented in these pages: Creole, African American, Native American, Isleño, German, Cajun, Italian, Irish, Greek, Hungarian, Croatian, Cuban, Honduran, Mexican, Indian, Filipino, Chinese, Vietnamese, and more.
With thirty-three first-person accounts and over one hundred black-and-white and full-color photographs, You Are Where You Eat proves that the local population remains as passionate about cooking after the hurricanes of 2005 as at any time before. Among the eighty-five recipes are such classic New Orleans dishes as red beans and rice, catfish court bouillon, crawfish bisque, filé gumbo, grillades, and daube glacé, but also more recent arrivals to local tables: yakamein, pork tamales, crawfish samosas, and Vietnamese spring rolls.
No comments yet