Here are 78 books that The House of Dance and Feathers fans have personally recommended if you like
The House of Dance and Feathers.
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Since childhood, I have been fascinated by the culture and stories of my place, the Mississippi Delta. I began my education in the beauty shop, where my mother “fixed” hair six days a week. I continued my education in the pool hall when I was 13 or 14, listening to the braggarts and fools who pontificated about every subject under the sun. I escaped to Memphis in the late 60s and became a hippie, drinking in the experience of Memphis’ electric streets. These experiences informed my thinking and helped me become a writer and filmmaker.
This is a comprehensive history of the Mississippi River in general and the Flood of 1927 in particular. Beautifully written and exhaustively researched, it was incredibly insightful and full of context, especially about the relations between the ruling-class planters and their African American workers. The influx of Italian, Lebanese, and Chinese immigrants is detailed and explains much of the Delta's cultural diversity.
The book also tells the story of the government’s response to the devastating flood, ultimately propelling Secretary of Commerce Herbert Hoover to the presidency in 1928.
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…
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.
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.
We grew up in predominantly white communities and came of age during the Civil Rights and Black Power movements. As academics, we focused on issues of race in our research and teaching. Yet, despite our reading and writing about race, we still hadn’t made a connection to our own lives and how our white privilege shielded us and made us complicit in perpetuating racial inequities. We didn’t fully see our role in white supremacy until we adopted our sons. Becoming an interracial family and parenting Black sons taught us about white privilege and the myriad ways that Blacks confront racism in education, criminal justice, health care, and simply living day-to-day.
A memoir that haunted both of us about Broom’s love for the New Orleans house she grew up in, her family, and a neighborhood torn apart by the institutional racism embedded in banking practices, zoning laws, highway development, and other corporate and government policies and practices.
Broom’s mother purchased the house in 1961 in a then “promising” neighborhood. Over the years, the neighborhood was cut off from the city by the growth of the interstate highway, which left this largely Black area in decline from years of indifference by New Orleans elected officials. The house was eventually destroyed by Hurricane Katrina.
The book provides a harrowing description of the destructive effects of institutional racism.
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…
Being from Upstate New York I went to college at Cornell University but headed off to New Orleans as soon as I could. By and by I became an instructor at Delgado Community College. Always a big fan of the city’s amazing historic cemeteries, when teaching a world architectural history class, I took the class to the Metairie Cemetery where I could show the students real examples of every style from Ancient Egyptian to Modern American. After coming to Texas State University, San Marcos (30 miles from Austin), I went back to New Orleans on sabbatical in 2013 and wrote The Cemeteries of New Orleans.
I discovered and used The World That Made New Orleans as a source for my book.
Upon opening the book, I was gleefully surprised to discover what an informative, interesting, and fun read it is. Sublette describes the French origins of the city in the early 1700s which involved wild parties, debauchery, tragic exploratory expeditions, and a massive Ponzi scheme that used Louisiana and the fictional gold mines there to defraud most every rich person in France, eventually crashing the entire French economy.
He then took me on a thrilling journey through the Spanish and early American periods to quadroon balls, Congo Square, and so many other fascinating places. I knew the city’s history was interesting, but reading The World That Made New Orleans blew me away.
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.
My love of mysteries began with Nancy Drew books. As I read more mysteries over the years, I finally decided it was time for me to write my own. A setting came to me immediately—New Orleans. I fell in love with the city through the Anne Rice and Julie Smith’s books. To write my cozy mystery series, I read all kinds of books. I read them for pleasure, but to make sure the details are correct in my books, The French Quarter Mysteries. I’m able to enjoy New Orleans through my sleuth, Samantha. It’s the next best thing to being there myself.
No matter where I visit, I always try to buy a book about the town.
I never come home from a trip to New Orleans with one. It doesn’t matter whether it’s non-fiction or fiction, novels or short stories. French Quarter Fiction is a collection of short stories featuring my favorite part of the city, The French Quarter.
The variety of authors and stories is incredible and features such different views and aspects of this amazing neighborhood.
"Branching across every genre, from mystery and romance to flash fiction and prose poetry, this anthology of works by preeminent writers on the heart of New Orleans features a previously unpublished story by Tennessee Williams, as well as stories by Richard Ford, Ellen Gilchrist, Robert Olen Butler, Andrei Codrescu, Barry Gifford, Poppy Z. Brite, Julie Smith, John Biguenet, Nancy Lemann, and Valerie Martin, among others. The characters in these works find themselves everywhere from Sarajevo on the eve of the First World War to Algiers Point just across the Mississippi River, but their stories are all anchored in the French…
Early in my career, I attended a writer’s conference in southern Louisiana. During a discussion of the best-selling Louisiana-based novels of Vermont-born author Francis Parkinson Keyes, a local historian said with great ire, “That woman came down here and picked our brains for her books!” As a follower of my state’s incredible past, I immediately saw the attraction. Since then, I’ve written more than 65 historical and contemporary novels, most set in New Orleans and broader Louisiana. Hours have been spent at the famed Historic New Orleans Collection, talking to people and walking the streets of the French Quarter—and, of course, collecting a library of famous Louisiana histories.
Though a seventh-generation Louisianian, I was born and raised in the northern portion of the state. When I decided to write about early New Orleans, I realized deep research would be required. The first book my local librarian recommended was Saxon’s Fabulous New Orleans.
I was enthralled, not least because I discovered he was also not a native of the city, though he lived in the French Quarter for many years and was instrumental in preserving many of its historic buildings from demolition.
With a style that immediately draws you in, this book is filled with pageantry and grandeur, personality, and rich detail, which makes researching the Vieux Carré a pleasure rather than a chore.
This classic reprint evokes a city steeped in the traditions and idiosyncrasies of three cultures--French, Spanish, andAmerican. Known widely as one of Louisiana's great writers, Lyle Saxon documented many of the quirks and mysteries of New Orleans. His narratives include a vivid picture of Mardi Gras as seen through the eyes of a young boy, a brief history of the city, and accounts of strange and remarkable events, including the great Mississippi flood of 1927, the year of the great plague, and a voodoo cult ceremony.
By any standards, New Orleans is a unique city, and Saxon depicts it unadorned,…
I was raised in Springfield, Illinois, what is considered Lincoln’s backyard. I grew up fascinated by history, and the Civil War in particular. The trouble was, its racial overtones always bothered me. Later in life, I became a high school history and journalism teacher and turned my interest in historical-based board gaming into a business I called Indulgent Wife Enterprises (because my wife is so incredibly supportive). To date, I have published 30 board games based mostly on American conflicts. When I retired, I began the ambitious project of writing a strongly researched account of the divisions leading up to the Civil War and through to the Reconstruction period that followed.
I love biographies, and I particularly loved this one because it portrayed a brilliant, accomplished, but complicated soul. Here was a man, a rebel hardliner who was once Robert E. Lee’s sounding board and deeply respected throughout the defeated Confederacy.
I wanted to know why he defied the South, became good friends with President Grant, joined the Republican Party (Lincoln’s party), and became a supporter of Radical Reconstruction. As I read, I learned, and the learning fascinated me.
Finalist, Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Biography American Battlefield Trust Prize for History Finalist
A "compelling portrait" (Jon Meacham, Pulitzer Prize -winning author) of the controversial Confederate general who later embraced Reconstruction and became an outcast in the South.
It was the most remarkable political about-face in American history. During the Civil War, General James Longstreet fought tenaciously for the Confederacy. He was alongside Lee at Gettysburg (and counseled him not to order the ill-fated attacks on entrenched Union forces there). He won a major Confederate victory at Chickamauga and was seriously wounded during a later battle.
Being from Upstate New York I went to college at Cornell University but headed off to New Orleans as soon as I could. By and by I became an instructor at Delgado Community College. Always a big fan of the city’s amazing historic cemeteries, when teaching a world architectural history class, I took the class to the Metairie Cemetery where I could show the students real examples of every style from Ancient Egyptian to Modern American. After coming to Texas State University, San Marcos (30 miles from Austin), I went back to New Orleans on sabbatical in 2013 and wrote The Cemeteries of New Orleans.
This book provides an intimate look at Storyville, the legal New Orleans red-light district that operated in a grid of streets nestled between St. Louis Cemeteries no. 1 and 2 near the French Quarter from 1897 to 1917.
Although the book is a bit dated (it was published in 1974) and includes a few wild and unsubstantiated stories about certain historic New Orleans personalities, such as Marie Laveau, this mostly factual volume is a fascinating and detailed portrait of the "District," as Storyville was often called, and the colorful, sometimes tragic stories of the people who lived and worked there.
A true-to-life impression of Storyville, the only legally established red light district in the US
At the turn of the twentieth-century, there were hundreds of red-light districts in the United States, ranging in size from a discreet “house” or two in or near small towns and cities to block after bawdy block of brothels in larger cities such as Chicago and San Francisco. Storyville, New Orleans: Being an Authentic, Illustrated Account of the Notorious Red Light District seeks to offer the reader a reasonably true-to-life impression of Storyville, the most famous of the large districts and the only such district…
I have been writing and illustrating books for fifteen years, and I am passionate about the art of making picture books. I love music and dance too. While making this list, I was amazed by how different visual artists that I admire—and who have very different styles—were able to capture movement, rhythm, and energy. I was also fascinated by how the different authors crafted their stories and yet all of them managed to celebrate Black culture and resilience.
I love Gregory Christie’s artwork. His naïf style illustrations may seem crude and simple at first glance, but I think they are incredibly rhythmic and powerful.
His images pair seamlessly with the book's lyrical text, which depicts the awful hardships that enslaved people in New Orleans endured and the joy they felt on Sundays when they were free to play music, dance, and spend time together in Congo Square.
Winner of a Caldecott Honor and a Coretta Scott King Illustrator Honor A Kirkus Reviews Best Book of 2016 A School Library Journal Best Book of 2016: Nonfiction Starred reviews from School Library Journal, Booklist, Kirkus Reviews, and The Horn Book Magazine A Junior Library Guild Selection
This poetic, nonfiction story about a little-known piece of African American history captures a human's capacity to find hope and joy in difficult circumstances and demonstrates how New Orleans' Congo Square was truly freedom's heart.
I have written widely on themes related to race, slavery, 19th-century politics, the Civil War, and its aftermath. The Reconstruction era has sometimes been called America’s “Second Founding.” It is imperative for us to understand what its architects hoped to accomplish and to show that their enlightened vision encompassed the better nation that we are still striving to shape today. The great faultline of race still roils our country. Our forerunners of the Reconstruction era struggled to bridge that chasm a century and a half ago. What they fought for still matters.
This is a fitting companion to Ball’s earlier book Slaves in the Family, a meticulous account of his paternal ancestors’ slave-owning history and their biracial progeny.
In this book, Ball, a talented and engaging writer, dives deep into the buried story of a maternal forbearer in New Orleans, Constant Lecorgne, a working-class white creole. With novelistic flair, Ball takes us along with Lecorgne in his peregrinations through Louisiana’s violent and chaotic reactionary politics in the 1860s and 1870s. Ball faced a daunting challenge: to humanize Lecorgne without either sugarcoating his reprehensible behavior or forgiving him for it.
Few books I’ve read have so vividly captured the mentality of outspoken white supremacist “foot soldier.” I was often repelled by Lecorgne, but I wanted to keep reading. This is an essential book if we’re to begin to understand why ordinary white men were willing, even eager, to participate in the racist counter-revolution…
"A haunting tapestry of interwoven stories that inform us not just about our past but about the resentment-bred demons that are all too present in our society today . . . The interconnected strands of race and history give Ball’s entrancing stories a Faulknerian resonance." ―Walter Isaacson, The New York Times Book Review
A 2020 NPR staff pick | One of The New York Times' thirteen books to watch for in August | One of The Washington Post's ten books to read in August | A Literary Hub best book of the summer| One of Kirkus Reviews' sixteen best books…
