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I adore New Orleans. It is a most fascinating city. I've been looking forward to this one for a while but had to finish my research projct and my degree and take the LSAT before I started anything nonfiction. This will be poignant, too, considering how little recovery there has been in N.O. since Katrina.

Update: Woah, this book was first written in the '40s, and the racist commentary about the Choctaws in the first couple chapters almost made me puke. This edition was published in 1979, but apparently there were others in 1997 and 2001. I hope they have edited that shit out since 1979. It's vile.

Final update: In the end, the racism and sexism that was "normal" for the time this was originally written was just too much. It soured the author's voice for me, which was otherwise charming and occasionally quite funny. Surely, they have remedied this situation in subsequent editions. I hope so, b/c it's a fun history of this wonderful, wonderful city.

Aside from all of that, just learning about how the city developed, how streets got named (and renamed), how lines were drawn and inevitably crossed was rather sobering for me in light of our current environmental crisis. Is this what humans (particularly male humans) inevitably do? Mark out territory. Conquer the wilderness (and whatever other people already happen to live there). Compete with others for glory and profit and legacy... I loathe modern expansion, white-flight subdivisions, gated communities, etc. But it's nothing new (except for the white flight aspect of it). Every part of the New Orleans that I love, that I think of as "city" was all suburb at one point. *sigh*