HURRICANE STORY, five-star art from painful ational tragedy

HURRICANE STORY
JENNIFER SHAW
Broken Levee Books
$18.00 hardcover, available now

Rating: 5* of five

The Publisher Says: Hurricane Story is a spellbinding odyssey of exile, birth and return told in forty-six photographs and simple, understated prose. This first-person narrative told through dreamlike images of toys and dolls chronicles one couple’s evacuation from New Orleans ahead of the broken levees, the birth of their first child on the day that Katrina made landfall, and their eventual return to the city as a family. Shaw’s photographs, at turns humorous and haunting, contrast deftly with the prose.

This clothbound hardcover edition includes an introduction by Rob Walker, author of Letters From New Orleans and former “Consumed” columnist for The New York Times Magazine.

My Review: Very, very pregnant photographer, husband, dogs, and cats, all escape New Orleans barely ahead of Hurricane Katrina. Son is delivered, family is displaced, much of New Orleans is destroyed, to our lasting national shame, and family returns to rebuild and resume living in the place they love and call home. The story isn't new, and it's not the first time anyone anywhere has told it in this words-and-images fashion.

But no one else anywhere has Ms. Shaw's extraordinary and amazing eye; her terse prose style, so beautifully suited to both story and images; or her quite astounding luck in being published by this amazing press, Chin Music via its New Orleans-centered imprint Broken Levee Books.

The book itself is worthy of being purchased simply to put on your front room's most prominent table. It is gorgeous. Bound in real cloth (my dog is still sniffing it, she's never encountered real cloth binding before) which is printed (let me assure you that this technique is far from simple, and its failure rate is significant; the technical demands on the printer, the designer, and the person making the color separations are quite significant; and the aesthetic that demanded this *exactly*right* production is quite rarefied) with an eerie, atmospheric image of great subtlety, the object itself begins its acquaintance with you by offering an uneasy glimpse into the mind of its makers. This will not be a candy-coated, literal, easy-to-process exercise in the journalism of indignance.

Opening the book, one reads the perfectly serviceable prose of two brief essays, one by Rob Walker, a former New Orleanian, and one by Ms. Shaw. Now we are mise en scene (oh, the badness of the pun), and the next page-flip takes you to spread 01: "We left in the dark of night." That's all she says in words. The photo facing the page bears a moment of painful clarity, expressed in a simple image of a red toy truck's tailgate retreating down a highly textured, shining road. The dark world closing in claustrophobically around this single spot of life, vividly red, the beautiful shining cobblestone-like texture of the road, the smoothness of the chiaroscuro...well, I could wax rhapsodic until you beg for mercy, but I won't. No point. Has to be experienced.

The use of toys and models to create the photo story is delightful. If I see one more image of people on a roof waving at the news copter while their house gives way beneath them, I shall scream blue murder. I avoid picture books of 9/11 for the same reason: I can't bear it. I've seen it! I've seen it! Stop smacking me! I won't look! But Shaw doesn't smack me. She wallops me ten minutes after I've seen her images. Dolls, with their awful starey eyes, usually make me uneasy. They still do here, but they are meant to, and they are deployed in simple, uncontrived story-telling, not some absurd, doomed effort to be archly Commenting On Life. The documentary "Marwencol" has much the same effect on me, and the same affect on its medium, as Shaw's dolls do.

And I must mention one thing in particular: Shaw's son is represented here by the King Cake baby. It's a nice, quiet, unpretentious symbol of her son's heritage. To someone without New Orleans knowledge, it's invisible and unnecessary to appreciate the story; to someone who knows what the symbol is, it's poignant and fitting.

Love New Orleans or loathe it, care about personal stories or not, this beautiful object should be in your home if for no other reason than to demonstrate quietly that you have excellent aesthetic taste and a real love for the object we call book. And the best part? It's only $18.

Buy one. Tell me I'm wrong. I dare you.

SCHOOL BOARD, prescient debut political satire from 2014

SCHOOL BOARD
MIKE FREEDMAN
Broken Levee Books
$14.99 Kindle, available now

Rating: 3.5* of five

The Publisher Says: Houston, Texas, 1999. Enter Tucker "Catfish" Davis, a high school senior with high-flying political ambitions as the self-proclaimed heir to populist Louisiana Governors Huey and Earl Long. Armed with idealism and a fedora, he embarks on a quixotic campaign to get elected to the local school board in an effort to help the "little people" of Houston.

In the wild days that follow, Catfish's long-shot bid gains traction through guerilla campaigning against a questionable tax deal supported by his opponent, a powerful executive at an Enron-esque energy company. With the help of his classmates, an indicted Louisiana governor, a gay journalist with nascent mayoral ambitions and an ex-Green Beret trained to wage unconventional warfare, Catfish makes it a race Houston will never forget.

Based on an actual 1999 news story, School Board is an entertaining but satirical debut novel that revels in the diversity, madness and absurdities of the Bayou City.

I RECEIVED AN ARC FROM THE PUBLISHER. THANK YOU.

My Review: First, read this:

"I'm not wearing this."
"You are if you want to win tonight's debate," the political consultant said, holding up the picture of Walker in full polo regalia in the Chronicle that Tucker's campaign had planted in the morning edition. "Less polo playing, more goat roping."
"We live in Memorial, the richest area of town."
The political consultant showed a poll from The Pony Express with Walker trailing by twelve percent.
"That's Tucker's paper," Walker said. "What legitimate poll has a margin of error of eleven percent?"

This is a sassy, Swiftian satire of turn-of-the-century Houston, Texas, and its far-too-rich, far-too-crazy political culture. The place that gave rise to both the Bushes that infested the White House. The culture that's given rise to many, many a ridiculous fad...moving their baseball team to the American League! building freeways not trams! nary a zoning law to be found!...is skilfully flensed by a native son who saw this plot play out in real life.

What makes books like this fun to read is the sense of absurdity and the fun they allow you to have laughing at, as well as with, the protagonist. The thing that keeps me reading in political satires is that sense of being outside the action looking at them make the stupid mistake or misread the room, a lot like y'all who watch The Office and Arrested Development do.

What didn't work for me, this time, was the sense that I, the one laughing at other people, wasn't laughing as hard or with as much contempt as the author was. He seems to have a really serious dislike for these characters. It's not like that's unheard of, of course, but it doesn't make me feel comfortable...I need to sense the author pulling his punches or I start sympathizing with the targets not the actors.

I won't shove it at you...but I won't say avoid it, either. In today's political climate, maybe this is just the thing for working through your emotional breakdown as the spectacle of Clinton versus Trump (!!) unfolds.