The best books to understand and appreciate New Orleans

There is no New Orleans without the Mississippi River.  

Rising Tide tells the story of government and engineers’ flawed efforts to control this mighty river, and how they contributed to the disastrous 1927 flood that left over one million people homeless and destroyed scores of towns. 

It provides a rich picture of the enduring social and racial divides in early twentieth-century New Orleans.

Moreover, it reveals how the city’s wealthy white leaders chose to flood neighboring communities to protect the city while undermining efforts to compensate the victims—creating a precedent for injustice and corruption, and ensuring a long-standing distrust of the city’s levees and flood control system.    

New Orleans is a historic, intriguing, and complicated city. 

So many forces have shaped its settlement, development, culture, and character.

Pierce Lewis helped me understand how New Orleans’s location and geography brought it into being and influenced how it has grown, along with how different immigrants and the blending of their cultures have shaped the city. 

He traces how the city’s economy has evolved in relationship to national economic trends and local political decisions on where and how to invest. The book is full of maps, photos, and images that enhance and illustrate the narrative and is written in an engaging style. 

It ends with a clear-headed perspective on the problems faced by New Orleans at the turn of the 21st century. 

In this memoir of growing up, leaving, and returning to New Orleans, Sarah Bloom provides an essential corrective to a romantic view of the city presented to tourists.

It portrays how her family bought, worked to make their own, and ultimately lost to Hurricane Katrina, the Yellow House in New Orleans East.

The extended family history predating Sarah’s birth is full of characters and stories that convey daily family and neighborhood life for a Black family rooted in the city.

I appreciate how much of the story is connected to and describes New Orleans East—the newest part of the city and home to almost a quarter of its residents—but hidden from most visitors.    

Unique cultural and social traditions are a big part of what makes New Orleans a special place. 

This book helped me gain a much deeper appreciation of how these traditions build and sustain communities, serve as artistic and political expression and draw on New Orleans’ African and Caribbean connections. 

The House of Dance and Feathers is a rare and beautiful book that presents the Mardi Gras Indians, Social Aid and Pleasure Clubs, Second Line parades (and a lot more) from a practitioners’ perspective as told by Ronald W. Lewis, founder of the museum of the book’s title. 

The scores of photos by Lewis and others provide rich documentation of the arts, crafts, practices, and communities that constitute these traditions.   

What makes New Orleans an unusual American city is observable to the senses, from its street names and architecture to its music and food, but how these came to be is far from evident. 

I learned from Ned Sublette’s book about how long ago conflicts, events, and settlement of the city tied to colonialism, war, religion, the slave trade, and slavery made New Orleans what it is today. 

It explains how this history melded the talent, skills, and practices of people from many places into a new cultural treasure that is New Orleans.

After reading this book, I now know the people and stories behind all those street names and appreciate how African, Cuban, Haitian, French, and Spanish influences shaped the music, dance, art, and festivals of the city.