My Year of Mardi Gras

OH WHAT A BEAUTIFULLY TANGLED WEB WE WEAVE

Nine Lives: Mystery, Magic, Death, and Life in New Orleans

by Dan Baum

Nine Lives is yet another stirring and beautiful book about New Orleans that will captivate and mesmerize you from the opening page. This book delivers exactly what the title promises, 9 separate life stories that are woven together to read like a novel, though these are actually people whom Dan Baum met while covering Katrina for the New Yorker. Some of the lives intersect casually, some intimately, and some never meet at all. They all come from different walks of life and varying social strata in different parts of town, yet Baum recognized that each had an amazing story to tell and by combining them, he tells the history of the city starting with Hurricane Betsy and winding through the post-Katrina recovery.

This is the genius of the novel. Although [Read more…]

FROM A DREAM TO A NIGHTMARE

Surviving Hurricane Katrina

by Mary Gehman

Yesterday I wrote about how the Morpheus, the god of dreams, made my Mardi Gras dream come true. Today I turn my attention to the near-incomprehensible nightmare of Mary Gehman, a writer, researcher, publisher, and professor who tried to ride out Katrina in her Mid-City home, only to find herself embroiled in a week-long ordeal that hit most of the archetypal Katrina images: rising waters in the home, stranded on an overpass, lack of food and water while helicopters hovered doing nothing, hell at the Superdome, and a disorienting bus ride to destinations unknown.

I am taking a different approach with today’s review. This is not a book or even a published article. Mary (I’ll her first name because I feel like I know her intimately after this account) owns a small independent press, Margaret Media, and dedicated a page on its website to this 29 page, single spaced document.

I learned of Mary’s account Friday after [Read more…]

LOVE IN THE TIME OF COLOR-CONFLICT

(YELLOW FEVER & BLACK MISTRESSES)

Yellow Jack

by Josh Russell

Josh Russell’s fictional historic re-creation set in 1840’s New Orleans, Yellow Jack, is a quick and compelling read that whirls its reader through two equally tragic narratives: the destructive power of a love triangle in a time of conflicting social mores and the annual devastating epidemics of yellow fever, a.k.a. ‘yellow jack,’ that ran rampant through this swampy outpost.

Russell tells his story through the eyes of Claude Marchand, a fictional apprentice of Louis Daguerre, the inventor of the first camera or daguerreotype. After Marchand has a falling out with his teacher he smashes Daguerre’s equipment, setting him back several years, and runs off to New Orleans to set himself up as part magician and part artist years before the photograph makes its European debut. Upon his arrival, though, Marchand takes to the streets in desperation and survives by using the pistol he’d taken from his master to rob locals. This theme of thievery rings true in New Orleans‘s history and serves as a good introduction to the danger the has always followed the city’s excess.

Marchand soon starts a transition to respectability, however, after he is [Read more…]