Product Description
High Quality Content by WIKIPEDIA articles! Barthelemy was born in New Orleans, the third of six children in a Creole family. He grew up in the Seventh Ward, and attended Corpus Christi Elementary School and St. Augustine High School (New Orleans). From 1960 to 1963, in preparation for entering the priesthood, he studied at Epiphany Apostolic Junior College in Newburgh, New York, and then entered St. Joseph Seminary in Washington, D.C., where he received a Bachelor of Arts degree in philosophy and pursued graduate study in theology. While in seminary, he worked summers as a laborer in a stevedoring company.In 1967, having made the decision not to enter the priesthood, Barthelemy returned to New Orleans and worked as an administrative assistant in the office of Total Community Action. From 1969 to 1972, he served as director of the Parent Child Center of Family Health, Inc. During these years he also completed a Masters of Social Work at Tulane University in New Orleans, worked part-time for the Urban League of Greater New Orleans and assisted with various political campaigns, joining COUP, a political organization based in the 7th Ward of New Orleans. ... Read more

Product Description
For more than 25 years, historian David Goldfield has interpreted southern urban history for various audiences. This collection of eleven of Goldfield's best articles-- four unseen until now--discusses the economic importance of the South's small antebellum cities, the impact of World War II on southern cities, black political power, quality of life, and much more . ... Read more

Product Description
In cities across the nation, communities of color find themselves resisting state disinvestment and the politics of dispossession. Students at the Center--a writing initiative based in several New Orleans high schools--takes on this struggle through a close examination of race and schools. The book builds on the powerful stories of marginalized youth and their teachers who contest the policies that are destructive to their communities: decentralization, charter schools, market-based educational choice, teachers union-busting, mixed-income housing, and urban redevelopment. Striking commentaries from the foremost scholars of the day explore the wider implications of these stories for pedagogy and educational policy in schools across the United States and the globe. Most importantly, this book reveals what must be done to challenge oppressive conditions and democratize our schools by troubling the vision of city elites who seek to elide students' histories, privatize their schools, and reinvent their neighborhoods. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (3)

superb for visiting this cemetery.
This is a short and sweet introduction to St. Louis Cemetery # 1 in New Orleans. Although this is the type of book you can read at home it becomes much more relevent if you take it along with you and read it as you tour this cemetery. Very interesting information.

I rated it four stars rather than five because Robert Florence wrote another book called New Orleans Cemeteries. Much of the introduction of this book is almost word for word in the New Orleans Cemeteries. That made it redundant for those of us who have read the larger, more complete book about all the cemeteries in NO.

I enjoyed this book. It was filled with a lot of good information. The authors appreciation of cemeteries and their buildings and history shows in this writing. I particularly like that there are stories of some of the people buried in thiscemetery. I would have liked to see more of that (Another reason for the four rating.)

Overall, I'd buy this book again and take it with me on my tour of this cemetery.

Fascinating history
I recently toured St. Louis Cemetery #1 with Robert Florence as the guide and was very impressed with his knowledge, not only of this graveyard, but of New Orleans in general. I purchased this book the next day at the Garden District Bookstore, famous as Ann Rice's neighborhood bookstore, and read the entire thing on the plane while flying home.The history of the cemetery and how it fits in with the history of New Orleans is just fascinating and written in a manner that makes for pleasant, easy reading.

A good introduction to the stange beauty of the cemetery
As a New Orleans native, I always enjoy playing tourist without having to risk my life to take in some of the wonderful buildings and architecture of my hometown.This simple but entertaining book takes you on a short (and Ido mean short) tour of St. Louis Cemetery #1, the city's oldest (and alsoone of the most dangerous to visit) cemeteries.To outsiders, N.O.'s rowsand rows of mausoleum walls is quite impressive.Thanks to New Orleansbeing seriously below sea level, above-ground burials have been a necessarypart of death.This book explains all the mystery and even highlights somefamous resting residents of the cemetery, such as Marie Laveau and HomerPlessy (of the famed Plessy v. Ferguson case).The author also reminds usthat playing tourist in this cemetery can assure you might not come out ofit.On the closing page, the author has reprinted the plaque from theArchidiocese explaining the lack of security in the cemetery and thedangers of touring alone.Group cemetery tours in New Orleans areabundant, so cemetery-sight-seeing alone is never a good idea.The bookexplains that as people leave N.O. for safer surroundings, they are alsoleaving the cemetery to fall into disrepair and decay.Many crypts are interrible condition, some nearly destroyed by vandals and the elements.Thebook has a very poetic overtone to it, and you can feel the author'sinterest and intrigue with St. Louis Cemetery #1.I only gave it 4 starsbecause I believe the book could have been longer without sacrificing therich tone it has.Excellent book, and the bibliography lists other greattitles if you just can't get enough of the strage lure of the New Orleanscemeteries and their haunting architecture. ... Read more

Product Description
This is a reproduction of a book published before 1923.This book may have occasional imperfections such as missing or blurred pages, poor pictures, errant marks, etc. that were either part of the original artifact, or were introduced by the scanning process.We believe this work is culturally important, and despite the imperfections, have elected to bring it back into print as part of our continuing commitment to the preservation of printed works worldwide.We appreciate your understanding of the imperfections in the preservation process, and hope you enjoy this valuable book. ... Read more

Product Description

Customer Reviews (15)

The incredible resilience of the human spirit...
Overcoming Katrina is a testament to the enduring resilience of the human spirit. These are the eyewitness accounts of a people who not only survived a monstrous hurricane which laid waste to parts of 3 states, not only survived a flood which inundated a major american city, but also survived inhuman treatment at the hands of their erstwhile "saviours".

The most incredible thing is that most of the narrators are still able to exhibit a positive attitude and willingness to start anew and continue building a warm close-knit culture unique in today's America. These are not the helpless impoverished criminals depicted in the news media of the day, but solid americans whose work ethic and values stand toe-to-toe with any Main Street in the U.S.A.

It arrived so quickly!
I was really worried about placing an order before moving to a different state. Fortunately, the book arrived well in advance of my move!!!


Thanks so much!

a Healing / a Revival / a Reckoning / a Survival
This is simply the best book on Hurricane Katrina that has yet been published. Why? It is having a circle of New Orleans survivors in your living room, laughing and crying and drinking cafe au lait and going around telling their life stories, intimately, truthfully, achingly, hilarously, sacredly, smoking the occasional cigarillo and using a starched hanky, praying, raging, truthtelling, with the inventive, delicious Sunday mornin' rhythms of Louisiana black talk. See how folks integrate the most devastating event of their lives into the story of their lives, and find sense, meaning and purpose (or absurdity, hopelessness, and enduring loss) in the aftermath. The generosity of the narrators is unparalleled: they tell all about their lives pre-Katrina (folk of all backgrounds will find it enormously fascinating on an American-ethnograpy level) and dive deep into the trauma and hope of their journeys in the Katrina diaspora.

Louisianans: Read this book to know your people. Texans: Read this book to know the power, dignity, failings, complexity, and victory of the communities who came to your doorstep. Americans: Read this book.

Required reading for those who care about Katrina's survivors.
There is nothing like oral histories to help us see people in 3D and go deep with their histories and the lives they lived before disaster struck. Penner and Ferdinand have done beautiful work recording the stories of these New Orleanians and sharing them with the world.I would recommend this book for anyone who cares deeply about Katrina's survivors, and would like to revel in the kind of life details that your typical Katrina historical narrative cannot slow down long enough to offer.You will never forget these men and women. This was an excellent read.

Make this book required reading
Overcoming Katrina is a bearer of heartfelt stories. One does not have to be African American, or from New Orleans, to appreciate the voices in this book.
I wonder if high schools across the country (if not the world) have added this book to their curriculum - they should be! Additionally, Overcoming Katrina should be required reading at social work schools. Thank you, to the authors, for a fresh and very real perspective of what took place before, during and after the storm. ... Read more

Product Description
In the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, as the citizens of New Orleans regroup and put down roots elsewhere, many wonder what will become of one of the nation's most complex creole cultures. New Orleans emerged like Atlantis from under the sea, as the city in which some of the most important American vernacular arts took shape. Creativity fostered jazz music, made of old parts and put together in utterly new ways; architecture that commingled Norman rooflines, West African floor plans, and native materials of mud and moss; food that simmered African ingredients in French sauces with Native American delicacies. There is no more powerful celebration of this happy gumbo of life in New Orleans than Mardi Gras. In Carnival, music is celebrated along the city's spiderweb grid of streets, as all classes and cultures gather for a festival that is organized and chaotic, individual and collective, accepted and licentious, sacred and profane.

The authors, distinguished writers who have long engaged with pluralized forms of American culture, begin and end in New Orleans--the city that was, the city that is, and the city that will be--but traverse geographically to Mardi Gras in the Louisiana Parishes, the Carnival in the West Indies and beyond, to Rio, Buenos Aires, even Philadelphia and Albany. Mardi Gras, they argue, must be understood in terms of the Black Atlantic complex, demonstrating how the music, dance, and festive displays of Carnival in the Greater Caribbean follow the same patterns of performance through conflict, resistance, as well as open celebration.

After the deluge and the finger pointing, how will Carnival be changed? Will the groups decamp to other Gulf Coast or Deep South locations? Or will they use the occasion to return to and express a revival of community life in New Orleans? Two things are certain: Katrina is sure to be satirized as villainess, bimbo, or symbol of mythological flood, and political leaders at all levels will undoubtedly be taken to task. The authors argue that the return of Mardi Gras will be a powerful symbol of the region's return to vitality and its ability to express and celebrate itself. ... Read more

Product Description
Lafcadio Hearn (1850–1904) was a master satirist who displayed a fiery wit both as a writer and as an artist. For seven months in 1880, he surprised and amused the readers of New Orleans with his woodblock "cartoons" and accompanying articles, which were variously funny, scathing, surreal, political, whimsical, and moral. This delightful book collects in their entirety, for the first time, all of the extant satirical columns and woodcut illustrations published in the Daily City Item—181 columns in all.Hearn displays immense range, illuminating in words and prints the unique culture of New Orleans, including its Creole history, debauched underworld, corrupt politicians, and voudou practitioners. The columns are expertly annotated by Delia LaBarre, who places them in their unique Crescent City context.

With virtually no training in art of any kind, Hearn began creating his illustrations partly to boost the circulation of a small daily newspaper in a competitive market. He believed in the power of satirical cartoons to communicate big ideas in small spaces—in particular, to reveal the habits, prejudices, and delusions of the current generation. Blind in his left eye (since a boyhood accident) and severely myopic in his right, Hearn nonetheless painstakingly carved out drawings on wood blocks with a penknife to be printed alongside his articles on the newspaper’s letterpress. Hearn developed, from the first of these woodcuts to the last, a unique style that expressed the full range of his wit, from razorsharp condemnation to tender affection.

Hearn had a keen eye for the absurd, along with an extraordinary ability to modulate his criticism and praise in a continuum from cauterizing vitriol to palliative balm, from the heaviest sarcasm to the lightest wit. In the pieces collected here, there can be found a unifying thread: Hearn’s love/hate relationship with the virtues and vices of New Orleans, a city that continually amused and amazed him.

Born in Greece and raised in Ireland, Lafcadio Hearn immigrated to the United States as a teenager and became a newspaper reporter in Cincinnati, Ohio. When he married a black woman, an act that was illegal at the time, the newspaper fired him and Hearn relocated to New Orleans. In the early 1880s his contributions to national publications (like Harper’s Weekly and Scribners Magazine) helped mold the popular image of New Orleans as a colorful place of decadence and hedonism. In 1888, Hearn left New Orleans for Japan, where he took the name Koizumi Yakumo and worked as a teacher, journalist, and writer.

"And it may come to pass that I shall have stranger things to tell you; for this is a land of magical moons and of witches and of warlocks; and were I to tell you all that I have seen and heard in these years in this enchanted City of Dreams you would verily deem me mad rather than morbid." —Lafcadio Hearn, 1880, describing New Orleans in a letter to a friendAUTHOR BIO:Delia LaBarre is Executive Director of the Hearn/Koizumi Center in New Orleans. ... Read more

Product Description
This digital document is an article from Ebony, published by Thomson Gale on November 1, 2006. The length of the article is 827 words. The page length shown above is based on a typical 300-word page. The article is delivered in HTML format and is available in your Amazon.com Digital Locker immediately after purchase. You can view it with any web browser.

Citation Details
Title: The return of the State Farm Bayou Classic: the annual Grambling-Southern clash and other returning sports events give a boost to the flood-ravaged city.(BACK TO NEW ORLEANS)
Author: Gale Reference Team
Publication: Ebony (Magazine/Journal)
Date: November 1, 2006
Publisher: Thomson Gale
Volume: 62Issue: 1Page: 142(4)

Distributed by Thomson Gale ... Read more

Product Description
This digital document is an article from American Review of Canadian Studies, published by Association for Canadian Studies in the United States on December 22, 2008. The length of the article is 10322 words. The page length shown above is based on a typical 300-word page. The article is delivered in HTML format and is available immediately after purchase. You can view it with any web browser.

Citation Details
Title: Parading the underworld of New Orleans in Ondaatje's Coming Through Slaughter.
Author: Joel Deshaye
Publication: American Review of Canadian Studies (Magazine/Journal)
Date: December 22, 2008
Publisher: Association for Canadian Studies in the United States
Volume: 38Issue: 4Page: 473(22)

Distributed by Gale, a part of Cengage Learning ... Read more

Product Description
"Post-Katrina New Orleans hasn't been an easy place to live, it hasn't been an easy place to be in love, it hasn't been an easy place to take care of yourself or see the bright side of things." So reflects Billy Sothern in this riveting and unforgettable insider's chronicle of the epic 2005 disaster and the year that followed. Sothern, a death penalty lawyer who with his wife, photographer Nikki Page, arrived in the Crescent City four years ahead of Katrina, delivers a haunting, personal, and quintessentially American story. Writing with an idealist's passion, a journalist's eye for detail, and a lawyer's attention to injustice, Sothern recounts their struggle to come to terms with the enormity of the apocalyptic scenario they managed to live through. He guides the reader on a journey through post-Katrina New Orleans and an array of indelible images: prisoners abandoned in their cells with waters rising, a longtime New Orleans resident of Middle Eastern descent unfairly imprisoned in the days following the hurricane, trailer-bound New Orleanians struggling to make ends meet but celebrating with abandon during Mardi Gras, Latino construction workers living in their trucks. As a lawyer-activist who has devoted his life to procuring justice for some of society's most disenfranchised citizens, Sothern offers a powerful vision of what Katrina has meant to New Orleans and what it still means to the nation at large. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (4)

A Symbol of the Best and Worst of America
New Orleans was my parents first home after the WWII, and they truly loved every inch, every oddity, every horn, every bar, every hotel and citizen of this world that was unlike either of them had ever experienced. They shared the city with my sister and I, we grew up with the music, the smell and the food in our veins. Billy Sothern writes a symphony in words and emotions that every American should read and hear, an instrumental rendering of failures and racisim, of the death and resurection of a great American treasure. Buy and keep this book for your children and theirs!

Personal, engaging story
Disclaimer: I went to law school with Billy and was always moved by the heart and conviction he showed in an overwhelmingly corporate-directed environment.That he has spent his career representing death row inmates in New Orleans is not a surprise, but it is an inspiration.I loved reading the book: Billy writes beautifully and with heart.His deep love for NOLA comes through on every page, as does his pain at the aftermath of Katrina.The book is also impressively well researched.As a reader, I learned and I felt.To Billy: thank you for writing this and thank you for what you do.If only there were more people like you . . .

Liberalism Gone Amuck
Written with a very liberal slant, I found this book to be too biased in blaming the government for the woes of those left behind. While certainly, there is enough blame to go around, and the government did indeed fail, still, while reading this book, the lack of emphasis on personal responsibility was troubling to me.

However, I did enjoy learning about Louisiana politics and history. And, I did appreciate the authors clear, concise depiction of the political machine in place that allowed a swamp land to be developed for the sake of the almighty dollar.

I've read many books written about Katrina.This one is at the bottom of the list.

A Love Song and an Eulogy
Sothern, Billy. "Down in New Orleans: Reflections from a Drowned City", University of California Press, 2007.

A Love Song and an Eulogy

Two years ago Katrina took New Orleans by storm and now the stories are coming out. I can't imagine returning to the Crescent City but I do enjoy reading abut what is going on there. In "Down in New Orleans" Billy Sothern tells how hard it is to live in the town post-Katrina. He not only says that it is hard to live there but he also says that it is hard to love there and hard to take care of oneself. He carefully chronicles the coming of the storm as well as the year that followed it.
Sothern and his wife moved to New Orleans four years before Katrina and he writes both a love song and a eulogy to the city. He writes with passion and detail and explains how he and his wife came to deal with what they experienced. Some of the images that he presents make me remember just too well some of my own experiences that I have struggled to forget.
What amazes me the most is the spirit f the people who managed to celebrate Mardi Gras while living in trailers amid the destruction of the city. What is most important is that he looks at not only the vision of what Katrina brought to New Orleans but to the entire nation. He damns everything that went wrong after the stormbut also gives a beautiful tribute to New Orleans. It is hard to believe that two years later, New Orleans is still not back up and running as it should and that the government of the United States as done so little to help the city return to its former self.
This is a book that causes the heart to break and it does so by exposing the inners of the city that was having serous problems long before Katrina. We get to see the dignity and the desire of the survivors to have their city back but Sothern also looks at many urgent issues that do not seem to have any help coming. Sothern shows how the government of the United States has not served the common good and has not protected the poor and the vulnerable.
To forget and forsake New Orleans is a terrible thing and we can almost feel Sothern urging us to return and not just return but do so immediately.
Sothern's emotions are right there on the page and it is hard not to be moved by what he writes. As a former New Orleanian I found myself often moved to tears while reading but I also knew that I would not return to a city that has so many problems and class divisions. I love Little Rock and she has been good to me but that New Orleans inside of me will always be there. I left some of me there but I am not planning to return. I don't think I am ready or even want to deal with it all.
... Read more

Customer Reviews (2)

wonderful novel
Flogstad's Dollar Road ("Dalen Portland" in Norwegian) is a compelling, often quite brilliant picaresque on the road to Social Democracy in Norway. To me, it's an absolute shame that more people haven't read this book, and I do not think that you have to have lived in Norway (or read copious amounts of Marx and Hegel) to enjoy this book--though it certainly helps. It touches on themes of industrialization, international trade, neo-Marxism, philosophy, science...It's a very brilliant work, an amazing first novel, rich with detail and consistently intellectually engaging. A great novel--possibly the best from Scandinavia in the last 50 years

Probably the best Norwegian novel after WWII.
The novel is a story of how the farmer population in a Norwegian town walks down 'Dollar Road' to the capitalist industrial society, and how that changes their way of living ... but not necessarily their way of thinking.

The author combines this large societal perspective with close-up portraits of the people walking Dollar Road. Two characters are of special interest. One is a somewhat pathetic representative of the more or less uninteresting lives in the new everyday of industrial society.

The other becomes a sailor who experiences great adventures in South America and ends up being a half-hearted radical librarian, marrying a girl who happens to be his sister in blood. And he just walks out of the last pages knowing that he also is the half-breed of capitalism.

I have read this book (in Norwegian) four times - discovering new details and perspectives each time. Strongly recommended!
... Read more

Product Description
Foreword by Fred Hobson and illustrations by Steven Cragg.Hal Crowther prides himself on being one of the last generalists in a professon of specialists.His eloquent essays on culture, history, politics, religion, arts, and literature have established him as one of the most influential Southern journalists of his generation.Cathedrals of Kudzu represents his ambition to "cover" the South-"its writers, politicians, geniuses, saints, villains, and eccentric folkways-with the same wide-angle lens H. L. Mencken used to capture all of America in the 1920s.To cover it, in other words, from a judicious distance, but with the ironical bite of his own not inconsiderable prejudices."Like Mencken," reads Crowther's citation for the 1992 H. L. Mencken Writing Award, "Hal Crowther has the narrowed pupil of a sharpshooter, the hairy ear of a heavy artilleryman, and the ballistic rifling of an implacable anathematist."

In these superb essays, most of them first published in The Oxford American, he sorts out a whole warehouse of Southern idiosyncrasy and iconography, including the Southern belle, Faulkner, James Dickey, Stonewall Jackson, Cormac McCarthy, Walker Percy, Erskine Caldwell, guns, dogs, fathers, trees, George Wallace, Elvis, Doc Watson, the decline of poetry, and the return of chain gangs.Unlike Mencken, who was incorrigibly cynical about his subjects, Crowther is capable of affectionate, even sentimental, concessions-even to some of the most dubious players who cross his stage.

These are very personal essays, though they include a wealth of reporting and research.They're conversations with the reader, who is invited to bring his or her experience and prejudice to the topic at hand.There's no quarter given, but no ideological orthodoxies to reassure one faction or alienate another.Crowther is an intellectual free agent.In his essays, the book page and the editorial page find common ground.

Taken as a whole, Hal Crowther's pieces offer a portrait of the modern South with a rich backdrop of its history and its classic literature.More personally, they present a vivid intellectual self-portrait of the man Kirkpatrick Sale has called "the best essayist working in journalism today." ... Read more

Customer Reviews (4)

Cathedrals indeed
My long-time readers are aware that I am drawn to essayists as unswervingly as I am drawn to essaying. In my online journal (The Soupletter, 1993-2003) I reviewed collections by Diane Ackerman, Annie Dillard,Stephen Jay Gould, Barbara Kingsolver, Ann Lamott, Kurt Vonnegut, E.B. White, Terry Tempest Williams and many others. Each and all are wonderful wordsmiths, and Crowther belongs right up there with the best of them. CATHEDRALS OF KUDZU is largely drawn from the author's regular contributions to The Oxford American a lofty journal, with a regretably small readership. Though Crowther's newspaper column runs regularly in the Independent of Raleigh, and irregularly elsewhere in the alernative press, he deserves a much wider audience. On the other hand, one cannot ignore the fact that writing at his level is aimed a little high for a general readership. Crowther draws on wide knowledge of literature and history, a marvelous vocabulary, a well-honed scepticism, and his enormous good nature, in delineating, skewering, praising and confessing to the sins and glories of his South. His discussion of race relations is the sanest I have seen in print, period. His consideration of the meaning of the Confederacy and its lingering traces is thought provoking and deep, as his consideration of bourbon and hurricanes, evangelists and trees. Well done, I say, well done. A book of southern grace and southern cussedness, showcasing a writer fully deserving of the H.L. Mencken Award he received in 1992, who is still at the top of his form.

Southern Superstar!
A WONDERFUL read! Great for any Southern culture enthusiast! Good source for other Southern books as many references are made in the text. Excellent!!!

Nostalgia at its Best
I was born, raised and educated through college in Alabama, and I was riveted by Hal Crowther's account of life and culture in the South.I couldn't put it down; my husband kept asking why I was laughing out loud.It covers the gamut of everything Southern--from race relations to dogs to barbeque to Elvis.Crowther is a sympathetic writer, but pulls no punches and is not (in my view) the least bit revisionist about the South's mottled history.You'll enjoy the book more if you've paid homage at the altar of Southern literature--Eudora Welty, William Faulkner, Walker Percy.I would recommend it especially to any Southern ex-pats.Fire up your grill, make some iced tea (or pour yourself a bourbon if you're so inclined), put an Elvis CD on the stereo, and kick back.

Y'alternative Reading
This book is really worth your time. Hal Crowther isfunny and seriousand highly original, even with the South's easy targets, like Elvis or theSouthern Belle. Even when Hal Crowther ishighly critical, he really getsat the essence of why regionalism is relevant, especiallywhen he'swriting aboutabout literature and religion. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (4)

Nicely done...
I gave this to my wife as a gift before our recent trip to New Orleans, and she carried this book everywhere.While any book like this is a bit out-of-date as soon as it is published, it was still very useful for finding all the sites and giving us good background information.One important note though is that Anne Rice is selling off her doll collection and the orphanage, so there is no longer any tour. That was really a disappointment.

Perfect for the specialist
If you're going to New Orleans largely because you're a fan of Anne Rice's Vampire and Mayfair Witches novels, then this is an essential.

I used it on my first trip to New Orleans. It includes self-guided tours of the French Quarter and Garden District that include Vampire Chronicle and Mayfair sites respectively without leaving out the must-see unrelated sites and experiences. The only caveat is that zoo fans should be aware that the Audobon is one of the best in the country.

Three types of sites are covered - those related to Anne Rice herself, those used in - or speculated to have inspired locations in - the books, and those where parts of "Interview" were filmed.

With chapters on guided plantation, swamp and cemetary tours, as well as restaurants and hotels (the last including descriptions of ambviance that helped me considerably in my choice of hotel), you'll have everything you need to plan your trip and not miss anything like the Ursuline convent where Louis found Claudia and the Gardiner House that inspired the home that Lestat, Louis and Claudia shared.

Best of all, Ms. Dickinson wants us all to be careful out there in a city that can become ominous if you go too far off the beaten track sans tour group - especially at night. As she wittily reminds us, we're not all as indestructable as Lestat, and if an area - even one that contains an Anne Rice site - is unsafe, she doesn't hesitate to tell us so. Following her advice, you'll see everything you want to see and get home safe and sound.

Picked it up In New Orleans
Last year, for Christmas 97 we had to go to New Orleans to see my father's family, I was having a a horrible time because of the weather. (We went the year before for Mardi Gras, the weather makes my hair go afro-y; it doesn'thelp to use your normal hair-care products.) We went to the French Quarterthe day we were leaving and pow there was this cool book. I had to get it,I've read all of the Mayfair Witches books. I recommend it to anyone that'sever wondered about where their favorite characters lived.

Anne Rice fan from Michigan
I saw this book in the bookstore and it's really interesteng. So mesmerizing that I couldn't put it down (thus being late to work). I realized just how much I had missed on my first visit to New Orleans. Iplan on going again in Spring and I'm taking this book as a guide of sorts.Full of many great odditites of New Orleans. ... Read more

Product Description

Product Description

Product Description

Mardi Gras, jazz, voodoo, gumbo, Bourbon Street, the French Quarter — all evoke that place that is unlike any other: New Orleans. In Authentic New Orleans, Kevin Fox Gotham explains how New Orleans became a tourist town, a spectacular locale known as much for its excesses as for its quirky Southern charm.

Gotham begins in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina amid the whirlwind of speculation about the rebuilding of the city and the dread of outsiders wiping New Orleans clean of the grit that made it great. He continues with the origins of Carnival and the Mardi Gras celebration in the nineteenth century, showing how, through careful planning and promotion, the city constructed itself as a major tourist attraction. By examining various image-building campaigns and promotional strategies to disseminate a palatable image of New Orleans on a national scale Gotham ultimately establishes New Orleans as one of the originators of the mass tourism industry — which linked leisure to travel, promoted international expositions, and developed the concept of pleasure travel.

Gotham shows how New Orleans was able to become one of the most popular tourist attractions in the United States, especially through the transformation of Mardi Gras into a national, even international, event. All the while Gotham is concerned with showing the difference between tourism from above and tourism from below — that is, how New Orleans' distinctiveness is both maximized, some might say exploited, to serve the global economy of tourism as well as how local groups and individuals usetourism to preserve and anchor longstanding communal traditions.