Book Lust to Go by Nancy Pearl

Author:Nancy Pearl
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Sasquatch Books
Published: 2010-10-25T16:00:00+00:00

NEWS FROM N’ORLEANS

Many, but not all, of the newer books on the city have to do with Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath. Here are my favorites.

Tim Gautreaux takes us back to New Orleans in the years following World War I in The Missing, a novel I discovered at a time when I was despairing about ever finding anything good to read again. I find it odd but accurate to describe Gautreaux’s writing style as both spare and lyrical. But it is. When three-year-old Lily is kidnapped in the New Orleans department store where Sam Simoneaux works as an in-house detective, he makes it his mission to locate her. Much of the novel takes place on a riverboat—a four-deck, 300-foot stern-wheeler where Lily’s parents work as musicians. The novel moves as you might imagine the Mississippi itself does, slow, stately, and steady.You may have to consciously slow down to read it (I did)—much as you do with a nineteenth-century novel.All of our senses—smell, taste, sight, and sound—are engaged as we as we slowly turn the pages.

Dave Eggers’s Zeitoun is a biography-as-novel of Abdulrahman Zeitoun, a New Orleans contractor born in Syria, who decides to send his wife and children out of the city as Hurricane Katrina approaches, but chooses to stay behind himself and ride out the storm. As a result of that decision, he’s caught up in a bureaucratic nightmare growing out of the flaws in crisis management and the domestic war on terror.

Other excellent choices include these:

Amanda Boyden’s Babylon Rolling, featuring a large cast of exquisitely drawn characters who face up to the imminent threat of Hurricane Ivan in 2004.

In Nine Lives: Death and Life in New Orleans Dan Baum, a writer for The New Yorker, brackets his story of the city and its residents by two classic storms: Hurricane Betsy in 1965 and Katrina in 2005. Through Baum’s descriptions, the people he profiles and their lives become intensely important to us.

An excellently readable nonfiction account of Katrina—putting it into historical context—is Douglas Brinkley’s The Great Deluge: Hurricane Katrina, New Orleans, and the Mississippi Gulf Coast.

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