NEW ORLEANS: A Concise History of an Exceptional City, lovely-looking introduction to unique place

NEW ORLEANS: A Concise History of an Exceptional City
CHARLES D. CHAMBERLAIN
LSU Press (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$19.95 ebook, available now

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: Intended for general readers, Charles D. Chamberlain’s New Orleans: A Concise History of an Exceptional City offers a broad, reliable overview of the city’s history. Although many excellent books are available that focus on specific eras in the Crescent City, this book is the first fully inclusive scholarly history that is engaging and easy to follow.

In addition to a general historical narrative, each chapter provides a list of relevant historical sites and a carefully selected recipe to make the city’s history come to life through site visits and culinary pursuits. Chamberlain encourages readers to experience the spirit of New Orleans first-hand by exploring its landscape and interacting with its cuisine.

New Orleans: A Concise History of an Exceptional City is a trusty reference for tour guides and a valuable, interactive resource for general readers interested in the fascinating history of one of America’s most unique cities.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: New Orleans, like New York City, is an alien body inside the US as a whole. Places like LA and Miami are, at heart, very American in spite of being significantly non-white in population. New Orleans does not *feel* American. It's been that way ever since the US incorporated it into the expanding empire in 1815. (There was a battle there, if you don't remember from history class.)

This overview of its history after colonization is thorough, within its limits as a popular text not a scholarly deep dive. If I was heading for the Big Easy for the first time this is exactly the book I would want to read. I was particularly impressed with the author's culinary additions to the history...recipes and food history in with political and other cultural stuff is exactly the kind of information I'd look for in a place new to me. It's especially relevant to any discussion of New Orleans. It's a good tour of the city, too, as the Table of Contents shows:

It's always good to look at the map before getting into the territory, so both pages are here. There are also illustrations throughout the book to highlight what's being discussed:

A central truth of New Orleans is shown in the last illustration, the map. Your compass has little relevance in this place. The directions are Uptown, Downtown, Lakeside, and Riverside, not north south east west. It reflects the real geography of the place; it's also a reinforcing factor in New Orleans' unique, counterintuitive culture.

I recommend this book in either ebook or paperback because it reads as well and has logical formatting in either edition. I recommend it to armchair travelers most especially; as heartily to trip-planners; and to the mildly curious, borrow a paperback from your library. Well worth your time and treasure regardless of format.

MOSQUITOES by William Faulkner...an overachiever's second novel

MOSQUITOES
WILLIAM FAULKNER
Liveright
$14.95 trade paper, available now

Rating: 3* of five

The Publisher Says: Mosquitoes centers around a colorful assortment of passengers, out on a boating excursion from New Orleans. The rich and the aspiring, social butterflies and dissolute dilettantes are all easy game for Faulkner's barbed wit in this engaging high-spirited novel which offers a fascinating glimpse of Faulkner as a young artist.

"It approaches in the first half and reaches in the second half a brilliance that you can rightfully expect only in the writings of a few men. It is full of the fine kind of swift and lusty writing that comes from a healthy, fresh pen."--Lillian Hellman, New York Herald Tribune

My Review: Well, that's over. And thank goodness for that. I loves me some Faulkner, but this is a mediocre book.

It's an hour-by-hour, day-by-day account of a Lake Pontchartrain boat ride, peopled by the louche and the bohemian second-ranking artistes (spoken in a veddy, veddy affected tone) who infest the ever-pretentious city of New Orleans. (I mean, really, the place is a swamp, it's rotting around its own ears, it's poor as dirt, and it's so effin' hot that even mosquitoes have the sense to move out to the lakeshore for the summer. THIS is a place to build a city?)

It's a roman à clef, taking its "inspiration" from an actual boat ride Faulkner went on in New Orleans before moving to Paris. Where, not coincidentally, Faulkner met Sylvia Beach, who published Ulysses, the famously banned-in-Murrika sexytime (for its day in the early 1920s) novel that "inspired" the hour-by-hour day-by-day format of this book.

Also not coincidentally, Joyce's masterwork (which I don't much like) "inspired" Uncle Bill to put in a lot of sex-talk, including *gasp* explicitly lesbian desires!! Maud Martha, bring the sal volatile and loosen my stays, the wimminfolk are runnin' amok!

Now that might seem a tad mean-spirited for a man writing 87 years later, to go after such a very surprising and open sexual transgression of the day, but trust me when I tell you: The roman à clef aspects of the book completely render the daringness of the author's choices into tawdry score-settling and Bret-Easton-Ellisy tittle-tattle.

Want to know why I say that? I'm tellin' ya anyway: Every character on the damn boat (the Nausicaa, "Burner of Ships," get it huh get it get it? Faulkner's bein' all erudite an' stuff!) is a loser, and Faulkner writes himself in as the only "successful" artist around:

"Anyway, I didn't go in swimming where the man got drowned. I was waiting for them, and I got talking to a funny man. A little kind of black man--"
"A nigger?"
"No, he was a white man, except he was awful sunburned and kind of shabby dressed--no necktie and hat. Say, he said some funny things to me. He said I had the best digestion he ever saw, and he said if the straps of my dress was to break I'd devastate the country. He said he was a liar by profession, and he made good money at it, enough to own a Ford as soon as he got it paid out. I think he was crazy. Not dangerous, just crazy."

The speaker goes on to remember his name was something like Walker or Foster, but whatever it was it started with an "F" like her friend's middle name, Frances.

Ye gods.

Well, it was only his second novel. And he'd just come home from Paris when he (most probably) wrote it, so he was still digesting the *huge* bolus of Kulcher he'd swallowed and wallowed in. He was young and this is a very young-man-overachiever kind of a novel. It's not the worst book I've ever read, and not even the least impressive Faulkner I've read (no fan of Wild Palms, me).

But it's just too good to dismiss and just too clever-clever to enjoy and just too coltish to admire in the context of the Faulkner ouevre. Neither fish nor fowl, as Mama said of suchlike creations.

Perfect title, then: Mosquitoes.


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A few other good quotes:

“Talk, talk, talk: the utter and heartbreaking stupidity of words.”

On a loser's "way" with women, spoken by a woman bystander:
“You tell 'em, big boy; treat 'em rough.”

Latest review at The Small Press Book Review!

Another four-star review, this time of a short novel set in New Orleans: THE WISDOM OF ASHES from small press Lavender Ink, based in New Orleans. The book is a short 100pp. By page 10, I wasn't tasting anything but Mississippi water as I submerged in the reality of New Orleans and its many many broken pieces that still knit together.

Jonathan Kline, the author, is a poet. Don't let that scare you off. He's a very talented prose stylist, too. Now $9.99 on Kindle: https://smile.amazon.com/Wisdom-Ashes-Standing-Gate-ebook/dp/B0B6RZWBJB/