Read "The Big Easy"

I’ve just returned from New Orleans in celebration of my parents 50th Wedding Anniversary. With all these amazing sights and sounds still fresh in my memory, I thought I’d share some pictures from my trip with some new and/or important books written about or taking place in and around the New Orleans area.  Click the title link to locate these titles in the Friendswood Public Library catalog.

Wicked River: The Mississippi When It Last Ran Wild by Lee Sandlin.

“A Fascinating book, rich in detail and lore. An entrance into a world so magical and unlikely that every page is a new episode full of real swashbuckling, nasty critters (human), and the roiling history of the big, bad river.”  ---Frederick Barthelme, Author of Waveland

A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole.

A New Orleans misanthrope who constantly rebukes society, Ignatius Reilly, gets a job at his mother's urging but ends up leading a worker's revolt. Pulitzer prize for fiction , 1981.

The Moviegoer by Walker Percy.

A winner of the National Book Award, The Moviegoer established Walker Percy as an insightful and grimly humorous storyteller with a rare talent for making his people look and sound as though they were being seen and heard for the first time by anyone. The Moviegoer tells the story of Binx Bolling, a young stockbroker in post-war New Orleans. The decline of Southern traditions, the problems of his family and his traumatic experiences in the Korean War have left him alienated from his own life. He daydreams constantly, has trouble engaging in lasting relationships and finds more meaning and immediacy in movies and books than in his own routine life.

Life on the Mississippi by Mark Twain.

Fashioned from the same experiences that would inspire the masterpiece Huckleberry Finn, Life on the Mississippi is Mark Twain' s most brilliant and most personal nonfiction work. It is at once an affectionate evocation of the vital river life in the steamboat era and a melancholy reminiscence of its passing after the Civil War, a priceless collection of humorous anecdotes and folktales, and a unique glimpse into Twain' s life before he began to write. Written in a prose style that has been hailed as among the greatest in English literature, Life on the Mississippi established Twain as not only the most popular humorist of his time but also America' s most profound chronicler of the human comedy.

 

Interview with the Vampire by Anne Rice.

In a remote room in a large city, a young reporter sits face-to-face with his most astonishing subject: a onetime New Orleans gentleman plantation owner who, in vividly terrifying and haunting detail, recalls his centuries of extraordinary life--beginning with his initiation into the ranks of the living dead at the hands of the sinister, sensual vampire Lestat.

 

American Uprising: The Untold Story of America’s Largest Slave Revolt by Daniel Rasmussen.

“New Orleans has been the scene of many dark adventures, but none so shocking as the slave rebellion of 1811. Dan Rasmussen has unearthed a stunning tale of freedom and repression, and told it in gripping fashion.”  ---Evan Thomas