Category Archives: book reviews

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Unfathomable City

Unfathomable City: A New Orleans AtlasUnfathomable City: A New Orleans Atlas by Rebecca Solnit

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I wrote an earlier review of this book ( I keep busy) and have now decided to update it since receiving the actual published book as I used the advanced reader copy for the previous review and now after reading more of it in a different location than the last time and viewing all of the maps that weren’t in the ARC and let me share that I did all of that new stuff all on All Saints Day, no less. Told you: multitudes.

I decided to do it without the cranky insertion of MY New Orleans up front that was in the previous review and to simply state that it’s a well designed, well-edited and at times beautifully written and illustrated homage to our mysterious city.
This book gives credit where credit is due. To the city’s geography, to its outlandish robber barons of bananas and oil, to the nameless and named that have brought us and bring us music, food, and public displays and joy and sorrow and pain and punishment. It neatly shows a number of juxtapositions that may be uncomfortable for some to view and others that are certainly unfathomable, but it does show them. There. credit given.
Now, back to me:
If you look through my reviews, you can spot a certain fondness for maps. I love them and love poring over them before, during or in spite of actually traveling to the place depicted.
If you read my reviews, you will no doubt spot a serious fondness for essayists. I admire what seems to me to be honest human bravery in extending a point or a purpose to a new end. Taking a walk with an author is how I visualize an essay, and yes there are times that I turn back before getting to the end, but I still appreciate the offer. So maps and essays seem like two sides of one coin and when put together well can alter or color each other’s point and purpose.

So that this is a book of illusory and real maps combined with odd and delightful essays, edited by two sensitive writers is enough for me to tell you.

Let me let the writers and artists tell you themselves in essays and maps such as:

Civil rights and Lemon Ice

Hot and Steamy: Selling Seafood and Selling Sex

Ebb and Flow: Migrations of the Houma, Erosions of the Coast

Juju and Cuckoo: Taking Care of Crazy

Stationary Revelations: Sites of Contemplation and Delight

The first essays introducing this book are alone worth poring over and sharing; how often is that true? That should tell you about the care and thought put into this entire work and offer the best reason to plunk down your money, open it and thumb through while having a Pimm’s or a coffee in front of you, tucked away in a shady corner of our shared city. Enjoy it all.

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Fringes of the festival

Once you buy a panel pass for the TWLF, I understand that you might then feel compelled to squeeze every dime from it, running from one room to the next, checking off workshops, circling possibilities, slowly scanning the merchandise table in a spare moment, sure that the right gift for your literary friends is here. I have been guilty of that. 75 bucks doesn’t come that easily to me and so often I equate value with quantity, like so many Americans. I do, after all , shop at the dollar store.
Luckily, with age comes experience (let’s not talk about the bad eyesight and odd aches- what DID I do to my arm?) and so I have grown more aware of my choices, at least those that are available with a panel pass.
I could sit in the uncomfortable chairs of a ballroom or a museum through the post-breakfast to cocktail hours, hoping that the gentleman behind me would realize that his throat clearing is not discreet at all, but incredibly well-timed to cover the bon mots that most likely were what the rest of the audience was chuckling over when my ambient hearing returned. I could do that and have.
Or, I could pack up when I feel the energy lagging at the 12:10 mark and head for a fortifying gumbo lunch at the most appropriately named restaurant for a Tennessee festival goer (I believe in you. you CAN decipher this) followed by a cheap cocktail from the oddly agreeably afternoon haunt of the Chart Room, ultimately heading to Crescent City Books for an afternoon of lessons.
Once there, you meet Isabel, their traumatized but healing cat and talk of books and John Boutte with local author and bookseller Michael Z.
You head upstairs and immediately find a book that has no reason to be prominently displayed (this visit it was “Farmers Last Frontier: Agriculture 1860-1897, which is an astounding find this month), sit with your discreet, illicit cocktail and thumb through it while viewing books and book lovers, pausing to think of calliopes on steamboats and why people honk their horns so often and how creaking stairs can be both frightening and comforting.

And salute Tennessee and his devotees who bring you to the Quarter this fine day.

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A Field Guide To Trees

poetry. haikus.
French Quarter. Bill Lavender.
I approve and buy.

(Found at Crescent City Books on Chartres for a VERY limited time- based on the rumor that few copies are left, told to me by the excellent bookseller and trending author Michael Zell.)

Lavender

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Do You Know It Knows What It Means To Miss New Orleans?

I just heard from Chin Music Press that a paperback version of our book, “Do You Know What It Means To Miss New Orleans?” is arriving soon. I am honored to be among some original thinkers and good writers in this anthology and with such a creative publisher.

The hardcover is gorgeous; the design is worthwhile to get it in hardcover while you can and then get the new paperback to lend out.

 

 

http://store.chinmusicpress.com/product/do-you-know-what-it-means-to-miss-new-orleans

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review: City Life

City Life: Urban Expectations In A New WorldCity Life: Urban Expectations In A New World by Witold Rybczynski
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I liked Rybczynski’s book “Home” which observed how comfort, family life, privacy, efficiency (damn those Victorians) and work have shaped the idea of home.

“City Life” is an excellent overview of how Americans have evolved the modern culture of cities which remains one of our few last exports to the rest of the world.

He makes many useful observations:
The evolving definition of city, or town or burg. The word city comes from towns that had bishopric seats, and had nothing to do with population. In general, it had religious connotations. gulp.
That Americans simply brought their urban culture to the rural communities. Therefore, it follows that we don’t have the parallel cultures that much of Europe has still but instead share more within the building blocks of each community.
Maybe there is hope for us.
Unfortunately, I think much of what we now share across the nation starts with American Idol and ends with WalMart.
That many universities were built by architects as self-contained towns with a rich patron to bankroll the ideas and had little or no opposition to their ideas. That made me pause; since almost all architects and planners come from those environs, it occurs to me that their last experience of village life before designing them are these mock towns that believe wholeheartedly in the built environment and most often in a sort of medieval spires and green field view of life.
Uh oh.
But the most important part of this book for me is his chapter on housing for the poor and the great migration (great meaning whole bunches) of African-Americans to the Northern manufacturing areas. As we need to remember, the post war boom was basically over by the mid-1960s and yet no changes were made in the policies of the US for those who migrated to where the jobs once were. Housing for the poor reflected that missed opportunity and still does.
I wish this part was longer but at least he attempts to add it to the conversation. That accessibility is still the main reason for city life I agree with but not sure that I agree that with wireless accessibility, fewer physical cities may need to exist. That may be true, although I feel that theory has been preached since the 19th century (and its advent of the ” annihilation of time and distance” with the invention of the telegraph, railroad and photography) yet cities continued to grow in importance and size in that very time.

I also wish there was more on the immigrant experience and how it has changed in America and therefore changed cities too. I know that in my own city newly arriving immigrants are now moving to the suburbs of Jefferson Parish as soon as they arrive and not to the city center which worries me. I’d like to hear some perspective on that.
Rybczynski writes well for a wide audience and gives concrete examples of places that illustrate his points.
You can do worse than reading this primer, especially if you are new to the subject or prefer less academic views of heavy subjects, like me.

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couple of names from the past..

And I had several good meals at the popular tourist bar and cafe named “Olde N’Awlins Cookery” on Conti Street. The place is owned by Mike Lala, a long-time television cameraman in New Orleans who, after all those years of hanging out in bars, decided to open one. He has made his fortune serving the same four appetizers, four soups, and eight entrees year after year. It’s a successful formula with the out-of-towners. “I don’t change anything,” Mike told me. “I don’t even like to change the light bulbs.” Phil has known Mike Lala even longer than I have, but I always went to Olde N’Awlins alone. Phil says he isn’t going there until Mike starts using tablecloths.
Charles Kuralt, passage from his excellent 1995 book, “America”