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Breach of Faith: Hurricane Katrina and the Near Death of a Great American City

Jed Horne

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 28 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Editorial Review:

Hurricane Katrina shredded one of the great cities of the South, and as levees failed and the federal relief effort proved lethally incompetent, a natural disaster became a man-made catastrophe. As an editor of New Orleans’ daily newspaper, the Pulitzer Prize—winning Times-Picayune, Jed Horne has had a front-row seat to the unfolding drama of the city’s collapse into chaos and its continuing struggle to survive.

As the Big One bore down, New Orleanians rich and poor, black and white, lurched from giddy revelry to mandatory evacuation. The thousands who couldn’t or wouldn’t leave initially congratulated themselves on once again riding out the storm. But then the unimaginable happened: Within a day 80 percent of the city was under water. The rising tides chased horrified men and women into snake-filled attics and onto the roofs of their houses. Heroes in swamp boats and helicopters braved wind and storm surge to bring survivors to dry ground. Mansions and shacks alike were swept away, and then a tidal wave of lawlessness inundated the Big Easy. Screams and gunshots echoed through the blacked-out Superdome. Police threw away their badges and joined in the looting. Corpses drifted in the streets for days, and buildings marinated for weeks in a witches’ brew of toxic chemicals that, when the floodwaters finally were pumped out, had turned vast reaches of the city into a ghost town.

Horne takes readers into the private worlds and inner thoughts of storm victims from all walks of life to weave a tapestry as intricate and vivid as the city itself. Politicians, thieves, nurses, urban visionaries, grieving mothers, entrepreneurs with an eye for quick profit at public expense–all of these lives collide in a chronicle that is harrowing, angry, and often slyly ironic.

Even before stranded survivors had been plucked from their roofs, government officials embarked on a vicious blame game that further snarled the relief operation and bedeviled scientists striving to understand the massive levee failures and build New Orleans a foolproof flood defense. As Horne makes clear, this shameless politicization set the tone for the ongoing reconstruction effort, which has been haunted by racial and class tensions from the start.
Katrina was a catastrophe deeply rooted in the politics and culture of the city that care forgot and of a nation that forgot to care. In Breach of Faith, Jed Horne has created a spellbinding epic of one of the worst disasters of our time.


From the Hardcover edition.

The South Was Right!

James Ronald Kennedy, Walter Donald Kennedy

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 205 Average rating: 3.5 of 5

The South Was WRONG!! 2 out of 5 stars.
19 of 46 people found this review helpful.

That's right I said it. Let's be honest, Robert E. Lee did not approve of slavery, but he thought blacks were inferior to whites. Jefferson Davis owned slaves, but he trusted a black man to run his family business while he was away on business. "Stonewall" Jackson owned slaves, but he also educated blacks in his area by opening schools and churches for them. However, Jackson too also felt blacks were inferior to him. Basically, I am pointing out the fact that the "fathers" of the Confederacy was JUST like Abe Lincoln...a bunch of racists who had conflicting views about black people.

What Kennedy failed to realize is the South should blame themselves for their reputation. Its their behavior AFTER the Civil War that sealed their fate. These racists formed the KKK, which terrorized blacks, burn down their businesses and even burn down their churches. White women falsely accused black men of raping or looking at them, which led to black men being lynched. White men continued to rape black women as if they owned them. The South denied blacks equal access to education, health care, businesses, homes and jobs. The South denied blacks the right to vote and it goes on and on......

It will take ANOTHER 100 years AFTER 1860 for a new movement (The Civil Rights) for the South to get their act together and that movement took even more lives. The South needs to look at itself and stop blaming Abe Lincoln for their reputation....they are the ones who continued to be racist and evil after the War.

It is true...the North had its problems when it came to blacks, but at least the North left black people alone and allowed them to have some access to things. The South did not and even when blacks tried to build their lives by themselves, the South would harm them (example, Rosewood). That is why so many Southern blacks left the South after the War because in the North, they had a chance.

The South was WRONG and until they admit they hold some blame for their reputation, they will continue to be wrong.

Editorial Review:

An authoritative and documented study of the mythology behind Civil War history, clearly exhibiting how the South was an independent country invaded, captured, and still occupied by a vicious aggressor.

Bienville's Dilemma: A Historical Geography of New Orleans

Richard Campanella

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Ramblings of a Lowcountry Game Warden: A Memoir

Ben Mcc Moise

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Total reviews: 2 Average rating: 5.0 of 5

Editorial Review:

This title features the career-spanning tales of a coastal crimefighter, ranging from the dangerous to the hilarious.Moise served with distinction as a South Carolina game warden for nearly a quarter century, patrolling the coastal woods and waters of the Palmetto State. In this colorful memoir, the cigar-chomping, ticket-writing scourge of lowcountry fish and game law violators chronicles grueling stakeouts, complex trials, hair-raising adventures, and daily interactions with a host of outrageous personalities. Along the way he paints a vivid and fluid portrait of evolving attitudes and changing regulations governing coastal conservation.In briskly paced accounts of episodes ranging from dangerous to humorous, he introduces a lively cast of watermen, lawyers, country judges, hunters, and poachers who animate the coastal environs and whose quirky personalities and foibles are the game warden's daily stock in trade. Moise's narrative highlights the working lives of commercial crabbers and shrimpers, the antics of overly enthusiastic fishermen, and the great lengths to which hunters will go in their quests for doves, ducks, and marsh hens. Moise also describes encounters with displaced "urban wildlife," the coastal marijuana smuggling business, and his fellow game wardens.The memoir also features a foreword by Lloyd Newberry, celebrated hunter and senior editor of "Sporting Classics Magazine".

The Day Freedom Died: The Colfax Massacre, the Supreme Court, and the Betrayal of Reconstruction

Charles Lane

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Total reviews: 10 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Editorial Review:

The untold story of the slaying of a Southern town’s ex-slaves and a white lawyer’s historic battle to bring the perpretators to justice Following the Civil War, Colfax, Louisiana, was a town, like many, where African Americans and whites mingled uneasily. But on April 13, 1873, a small army of white ex–Confederate soldiers, enraged after attempts by freedmen to assert their new rights, killed more than sixty African Americans who had occupied a courthouse. With skill and tenacity, The Washington Post’s Charles Lane transforms this nearly forgotten incident into a riveting historical saga.
 
Seeking justice for the slain, one brave U.S. attorney, James Beckwith, risked his life and career to investigate and punish the perpetrators—but they all went free. What followed was a series of courtroom dramas that culminated at the Supreme Court, where the justices’ verdict compromised the victories of the Civil War and left Southern blacks at the mercy of violent whites for generations. The Day Freedom Died is an electrifying piece of historical detective work that captures a gallery of characters from presidents to townspeople, and re-creates the bloody days of Reconstruction, when the often brutal struggle for equality moved from the battlefield into communities across the nation.

Defying Dixie: The Radical Roots of Civil Rights, 1919-1950

Glenda Elizabeth Gilmore

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Total reviews: 2 Average rating: 5.0 of 5

Editorial Review:

A groundbreaking history of the Southern movement for social justice that gave birth to civil rights.

The civil rights movement that loomed over the 1950s and 1960s was the tip of an iceberg, the legal and political remnant of a broad, raucous, deeply American movement for social justice that flourished from the 1920s through the 1940s. This contentious mix of home-grown radicals, labor activists, newspaper editors, black workers, and intellectuals employed every strategy imaginable to take Dixie down, from a ludicrous attempt to organize black workers with a stage production of Pushkin—in Russian—to the courageous fight of striking workers against police and corporate violence in Gastonia in 1929. In a dramatic narrative Glenda Elizabeth Gilmore deftly shows how the movement unfolded against national and global developments, gaining focus and finally arriving at a narrow but effective legal strategy for securing desegregation and political rights. Little-known heroes abound in a book that will recast our understanding of the most important social movement in twentieth-century America.

The Strange Career of Jim Crow

C. Vann Woodward

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Total reviews: 9 Average rating: 5.0 of 5

Editorial Review:

C. Vann Woodward, who died in 1999 at the age of 91, was America's most eminent Southern historian, the winner of a Pulitzer Prize for Mary Chestnut's Civil War and a Bancroft Prize for The Origins of the New South. Now, to honor his long and truly distinguished career, Oxford is pleased to publish this special commemorative edition of Woodward's most influential work, The Strange Career of Jim Crow.
The Strange Career of Jim Crow is one of the great works of Southern history. Indeed, the book actually helped shape that history. Published in 1955, a year after the Supreme Court in Brown v Board of Education ordered schools desegregated, Strange Career was cited so often to counter arguments for segregation that Martin Luther King, Jr. called it "the historical Bible of the civil rights movement." The book offers a clear and illuminating analysis of the history of Jim Crow laws, presenting evidence that segregation in the South dated only to the 1890s. Woodward convincingly shows that, even under slavery, the two races had not been divided as they were under the Jim Crow laws of the 1890s. In fact, during Reconstruction, there was considerable economic and political mixing of the races. The segregating of the races was a relative newcomer to the region.
Hailed as one of the top 100 nonfiction works of the twentieth century, The Strange Career of Jim Crow has sold almost a million copies and remains, in the words of David Herbert Donald, "a landmark in the history of American race relations."

You Are Where You Eat: Stories and Recipes from the Neighborhoods of New Orleans

Elsa Hahne

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Editorial Review:

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.

Elsa Hahne is the creator of the touring exhibit You Are WHERE You Eat--Stories and Recipes from the Crescent City, which was supported by the Louisiana Division of the Arts and the Louisiana Endowment for the Humanities. Her work has appeared in numerous international magazines and newspapers.

Why New Orleans Matters

Tom Piazza

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 34 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

Preaching to the choir. 2 out of 5 stars.
5 of 8 people found this review helpful.

As a Nola expatriate, I was really looking forward to reading this book. I was very disappointed. It rambled, almost as if Mr. Piazza was so overwhelmed with love for his city (which I totally understand) that he couldn't organize his thoughts beyond effusion. It's too much preaching to the choir. I had hoped this book would pull those in who don't understand why we want to rebuild, who advocate for letting this culture and magnificence disappear! Piazza talks about the great restaurants and the wonderful music and eclectic personalities... He says *what's* important but he never communicates quite WHY. Living in the Midwest now and having a hard time defending why my city deserves to be saved, I read the book with a mindset of "what if I'd never been there". I was hoping this book could reach them, the naysayers. It doesn't. It can't. It's too caught up in itself. This book doesn't say why New Orleans should matter to those who currently care less; it's just a love letter. I can't imagine it will sway anyone who doesn't already have the context of living or visiting to understand his love.

Chris Rose's book, "1 Dead in Attic" somehow manages to do a fantastic job of this, even though his love for the city is just as great. Rose is a columnist for the local Times-Picayune. If you want to know why New Orleans matters, read his book instead.

I'd also recommend "Very New Orleans" by artist Diana Hollingsworth Gessler. Interestingly, this book is a compilation of detailed sketches and brief descriptions that capture the vibrancy of New Orleans in an incredibly uplifting way. I found myself smiling as I went through, page by page, not only remembering things I'd forgotten, but thinking to myself, "Now THIS is why New Orleans matters!!"

Editorial Review:

In the aftermath of Katrina and the disaster that followed, promises were made, forgotten, and renewed. Now what will become of New Orleans in the years ahead? What do this proud, battered city and its people mean to America and the world?

Award-winning author and longtime New Orleans resident Tom Piazza illuminates the storied culture and uncertain future of this great and neglected American metropolis by evoking the sensuous rapture of the city that gave us jazz music and Creole cooking; examining its deep undercurrents of corruption, racism, and injustice; and explaining how its people endure and transcend those conditions. And, perhaps most important, he asks us all to consider the spirit of this place and all the things it has shared with the world: its grace and beauty, resilience and soul.

Breach of Peace: Portraits of the 1961 Mississippi Freedom Riders

Eric Etheridge

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Total reviews: 7 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Editorial Review:

A beautifully-produced book that celebrates the Freedom Riders, featuring rare-seen mug shots alongside stunning contemporary portraits.In the spring and summer of 1961, several hundred Americans—blacks and whites, men and women—converged on Jackson, Mississippi, to challenge state segregation laws. The Freedom Riders, as they came to be known, were determined to open up the South to civil rights: it was illegal for bus and train stations to discriminate, but most did and were not interested in change. Over 300 people were arrested and convicted of the charge "breach of the peace."

The name, mug shot, and other personal details of each Freedom Rider arrested were duly recorded and saved by agents of the Mississippi State Sovereignty Commission, a Stasi-like investigative agency whose purpose was to "perform any and all acts deemed necessary and proper to protect the sovereignty of the state of Mississippi." How the Commission thought these details would actually protect the state is not clear, but what is clear, forty-six years later, is that by carefully recording names and preserving the mug shots, the Commission inadvertently created a testament to these heroes of the civil rights movement.

Collected here in a richly illustrated, large-format book featuring over seventy contemporary photographs, alongside the original mug shots, and exclusive interviews with former Freedom Riders, is that testament: a moving archive of a chapter in U.S. history that hasn't yet closed.