After hurricane Katrina, I was shocked by the scale of displacement and devastation, and the failed government response. I decided to use my planning classes at MIT to assist with rebuilding efforts. Over the next ten years, my students and I worked with several dozen organizations across New Orleans and provided ongoing assistance to three neighborhoods. Through this work and my relationships with many New Orleanians, I learned so much about the city and came to appreciate how special New Orleans, its way of life and people are.
I wrote
Coming Home to New Orleans: Neighborhood Rebuilding After Katrina
There is no New Orleans without the Mississippi River.
Rising Tidetells 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.
A New York Times Notable Book of the Year, winner of the Southern Book Critics Circle Award and the Lillian Smith Award.
An American epic of science, politics, race, honor, high society, and the Mississippi River, Rising Tide tells the riveting and nearly forgotten story of the Great Mississippi Flood of 1927. The river inundated the homes of almost one million people, helped elect Huey Long governor and made Herbert Hoover president, drove hundreds of thousands of African Americans north, and transformed American society and politics forever.
The flood brought with it a human storm: white and black collided, honor…
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 his now classic work of historical geography, published in 1976, Lewis traces the rise and expansion of New Orleans through four major historic periods. This revised and greatly expanded second edition brings that story up-to-date, illustrating how the city continues to overcome its site on the Mississippi Delta - ""a fearsome place, difficult enough for building houses, lunacy for wharves and skyscrapers.
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.
A NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER WINNER OF THE NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FOR NONFICTION
'A major book that I suspect will come to be considered among the essential memoirs of this vexing decade' New York Times Book Review
In 1961, Sarah M. Broom's mother Ivory Mae bought a shotgun house in the then-promising neighborhood of New Orleans East and built her world inside of it. It was the height of the Space Race and the neighborhood was home to a major NASA plant - the postwar optimism seemed assured. Widowed, Ivory Mae remarried Sarah's father Simon Broom; their combined family would…
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.
In the Lower Ninth Ward of New Orleans, Ronald W. Lewis has assembled a museum to the various worlds he inhabits. Built in 2003, the House of Dance & Feathers represents many New Orleans societies: Mardi Gras Indians, Social Aid and Pleasure Clubs, Bone Gangs, and Parade Krewes. More than just a catalogue of the artifacts in the museum, this full-color book is a detailed map of these worlds as experienced by Ronald W. Lewis.
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.
Named one of the Top 10 Books of 2008 by The Times-Picayune. Winner of the 2009 Humanities Book of the Year award from the Louisiana Endowment for the Humanities. Awarded the New Orleans Gulf South Booksellers Association Book of the Year Award for 2008.
New Orleans is the most elusive of American cities. The product of the centuries-long struggle among three mighty empires--France, Spain, and England--and among their respective American colonies and enslaved African peoples, it has always seemed like a foreign port to most Americans, baffled as they are by its complex cultural inheritance.
Coming Home to New Orleans documents grassroots rebuilding efforts in New Orleans neighborhoods after Hurricane Katrina, and draws lessons on their contribution to the post-disaster recovery of cities. With flawed government policies and responses, community-initiated rebuilding was vital to rebuilding New Orleans after the post-hurricane flooding and its devastation.
By profiling and comparing recovery efforts in six neighborhoods, this book shows how differences in geography, socioeconomic conditions, government policies, and neighborhood capacity created different recovery trajectories. It argues that grassroots and neighborhood-scale initiatives can make important contributions to recovery in four areas: repopulation, restoring “complete” neighborhoods, rebuilding the small business economy, and enhancing recovery capacity. As large-scale disasters become more frequent, the lessons from New Orleans’ post-Katrina rebuilding have never been more important.
After Dr. Shawn Jennings, a busy family physician, suffered a brainstem stroke on May 13, 1999, he woke from a coma locked inside his body, aware and alert but unable to communicate or move. Once he regained limited movement in his left arm, he began typing his story, using one hand and a lot of patience.
With unexpected humour and tender honesty, Shawn shares his experiences in his struggle for recovery and acceptance of his life after the stroke. He affirms that even without achieving a full recovery life is still worth…
Locked In Locked Out: Surviving a Brainstem Stroke
After Dr. Shawn Jennings, a busy family physician, suffered a brainstem stroke on May 13, 1999, he woke from a coma locked inside his body, aware and alert but unable to communicate or move. Once he regained limited movement in his left arm, he began typing his story, using one hand and a lot of patience.
With unexpected humour and tender honesty, Shawn shares his experiences in his struggle for recovery and acceptance of his life after the stroke. He affirms that even without achieving a full recovery life is still worth…
