Featured Ebooks
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For this month's Featured Ebooks, we have selected nonfiction titles about Louisiana's food, traditions, people, history, folklore, and more.
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Designing the Bayous the Control of Water in the Atchafalaya Basin, 1800-1995
Louisiana's Atchafalaya River Basin is one of the most dynamic and critical environments in the country. It sustains the nation's last cypress-tupelo wetland and provides a habitat for many species of animals. Endowed with natural gas and oil fields, the basin also supports a large commercial fisheries industry. Perhaps most crucial, it remains a primary component of the plan to control the Mississippi River and relieve flooding in New Orleans, Baton Rouge, and other communities in the lower river valley.The continuing health of the basin is a reflection not of nature, but of the work of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. With levee building and clearing in the nineteenth century and damming, dredging, and floodway construction in the twentieth, the basin was converted from a vast forested swamp into a designer wetland, where human aspirations and nature maintained a precarious equilibrium.Originally published by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers primarily for internal distribution, this environmental and political history of the Atchafalaya Basin is an unflinching account of the transformation of an area that has endured perhaps more human manipulation than any other natural environment in the nation. Martin Reuss provides a new preface to bring us up-to-date on the state of the basin, which remains both an engineering contrivance and natural wonder.
Buoyancy on the Bayou Shrimpers Face the Rising Tide of Globalization
Over the past several decades, shrimp has transformed from a luxury food to a kitchen staple. While shrimp-loving consumers have benefited from the lower cost of shrimp, domestic shrimp fishers have suffered, particularly in Louisiana. Most of the shrimp that we eat today is imported from shrimp farms in China, Vietnam, and Thailand. The flood of imported shrimp has sent dockside prices plummeting, and rising fuel costs have destroyed the profit margin for shrimp fishing as a domestic industry.In Buoyancy on the Bayou, Jill Ann Harrison portrays the struggles that Louisiana shrimp fishers endure to remain afloat in an industry beset by globalization. Her in-depth interviews with more than fifty individuals working in or associated with shrimp fishing in a small town in Louisiana offer a portrait of shrimp fishers'lives just before the BP oil spill in 2010, which helps us better understand what has happened since the Deepwater Horizon disaster.Harrison shows that shrimp fishers go through a careful calculation of noneconomic costs and benefits as they grapple to figure out what their next move will be. Many willingly forgo opportunities in other industries to fulfill what they perceive as their cultural calling. Others reluctantly leave fishing behind for more lucrative work, but they mourn the loss of a livelihood upon which community and family structures are built. In this gripping account of the struggle to survive amid the waves of globalization, Harrison focuses her analysis at the intersection of livelihood, family, and community and casts a bright light upon the cultural importance of the work that we do.
Gumbo
Perhaps no other Louisiana dish is as well-known as gumbo. Yet, as ubiquitous as it is, gumbo remains one of the least-understood and most-debated foods from the Bayou State. While everyone claims to know what gumbo is, practically no one can agree on what goes in one. Chicken or seafood, okra or filé, tomatoes or no tomatoes? Bear fat was once a staple in gumbo, corn meal was incorporated into the dish before rice was, and ham was once more common than smoked sausage. Disputes also extend to gumbo's origins. Is it Cajun or Creole? Does it hail from Africa, France, or North America? Over the decades, historians have pieced together clues to explain gumbo's likely origin story and yet they have never reached a consensus, allowing plenty of room for varied interpretations and explorations. In Gumbo, Jonathan Olivier draws on interviews with academics and chefs, original historical documents, and anecdotal personal information to consider the evolution of gumbo in the Pelican State. Oliver canvasses its origins in eighteenth-century Louisiana and moves on to the changes gumbo underwent in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries due to the commercial of agriculture and general commercialization. He concludes with contemporary takes on the dish. Overall, this book provides a comprehensive look at gumbo that will inform and entertain both Louisiana readers and visitors to the state
The Gorilla Man and the Empress of Steak a New Orleans Family Memoir
The Gorilla Man and the Empress of Steak is the story of two larger-than-life characters and the son whom their lives helped to shape. Ruth Fertel was a petite, smart, tough-as-nails blonde with a weakness for rogues, who founded the Ruth's Chris Steak House empire almost by accident. Rodney Fertel was a gold-plated, one-of-a-kind personality, a railbird-heir to wealth from a pawnshop of dubious repute just around the corner from where the teenage Louis Armstrong and his trumpet were discovered. When Fertel ran for mayor of New Orleans on a single campaign promise-buying a pair of gorillas for the zoo-he garnered a paltry 308 votes. Then he purchased the gorillas anyway!These colorful figures yoked together two worlds not often connected-lazy rice farms in the bayous and swinging urban streets where ethnicities jazzily collided. A trip downriver to the hamlet of Happy Jack focuses on its French-Alsatian roots, bountiful tables, and self-reliant lifestyle that inspired a restaurant legend. The story also offers a close-up of life in the Old Jewish Quarter on Rampart Street-and how it intersected with the denizens of'Back a'Town,'just a few blocks away, who brought jazz from New Orleans to the world.The Gorilla Man and the Empress of Steak is a New Orleans story, featuring the distinctive characters, color, food, and history of that city-before Hurricane Katrina and after. But it also is the universal story of family and the full magnitude of outsize follies leavened with equal measures of humor, rage, and rue.
Louisiana Voyages the Travel Writings of Catharine Cole
When nature exudes in a swamp in Louisiana it is rich, tropical, juicy, dark, verminy, repellant and lovely all in one,'wrote Catharine Cole in 1889.'It is like a coffin crowned with flowers; a death trap baited with roses.'Writing under the pseudonym Catharine Cole, Martha R. Field (1855-1898) became the first full-time newswoman for the New Orleans Daily Picayune in 1881. For more than a decade she was the woman's page editor and wrote a Sunday column,'Catharine Cole's Letter,'that established her as one of the most popular writers in the South. Cole wrote fiction, essays, editorials on.
Voices of the Enslaved
In eighteenth-century New Orleans, the legal testimony of some 150 enslaved women and men--like the testimony of free colonists--was meticulously recorded and preserved. Questioned in criminal trials as defendants, victims, and witnesses about attacks, murders, robberies, and escapes, they answered with stories about themselves, stories that rebutted the premise on which slavery was founded.
Louisiana Culture from the Colonial ERA to Katrina
Louisiana Culture from the Colonial Era to Katrina, a collection of fourteen essays compiled and edited by John Lowe, captures all of the flavor and richness of the state's heritage, illuminating how Louisiana, despite its differences from the rest of the United States, is a microcosm of key national concerns, including regionalism, race, politics, immigration, global connections, folklore, musical traditions, ethnicity, and hybridity.
Folklore Figures of French and Creole Louisiana
In Folklore Figures of French and Creole Louisiana, Nathan J. Rabalais examines the impact of Louisiana's remarkably diverse cultural and ethnic groups on folklore characters and motifs during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Establishing connections between Louisiana and France, West Africa, Canada, and the Antilles, Rabalais explores how folk characters, motifs, and morals adapted to their new contexts in Louisiana. By viewing the state's folklore in the light of its immigration history, he demonstrates how folktales can serve as indicators of sociocultural adaptation as well as contact among cultural communities.
Louisiana Women
Moving chronologically from the colonial period to the present, this collection of seventeen biographical essays provides a window into the social, cultural, and geographic milieu of women's lives in the state.
Bayou-Diversity
Louisiana's bayous and their watersheds teem with cypress trees, alligators, crawfish, and many other life forms. From Bayou Tigre to Half Moon Bayou, these sluggish streams meander through lowlands, marshes, and even uplands to dominate the state's landscape. In Bayou-Diversity, conservationist Kelby Ouchley reveals the bayou's intricate web of flora and fauna.
Louisiana Legacies
Showcasing the colorful, even raucous, political, social, and unique cultural qualities of Louisiana history, this new collection of essays features the finest and latest scholarship. Includes readings featuring recent scholarship that expand on traditional historical accounts Includes material on every region of Louisiana Covers a wide range of fields, including social, environmental, and economic history Detailed, focused material on different areas in Louisiana history, including women's history as well as the state's diverse ethnic populations
Bounce
In recent decades, younger generations of New Orleanians have created a rich and dynamic local rap scene, which has revolved around a dance-oriented style called'bounce.' Hip-hop has been the latest conduit for a'New Orleans sound' that lies at the heart of many of the city's best-known contributions to earlier popular music genres. Bounce, while globally connected and constantly evolving, reflects an enduring cultural continuity that reaches back and builds on the city's rich musical and cultural traditions. In this book, the popular music scholar and filmmaker Matt Miller explores the ways in which participants in New Orleans's hip-hop scene have collectively established, contested, and revised a distinctive style of rap that exists at the intersection of deeply rooted vernacular music traditions and the modern, globalized economy of commercial popular music
Louisiana Rambles
After Hurricane Katrina laid bare the fragility and environmental peril of South Louisiana, author Ian McNulty set out on a series of daytrips to delve into the area's diverse cultural landscapes. He explored communities staked up and down the Mississippi River, nestled into the teeming bayous, braced along the edge of the Gulf, and planted out on the golden prairie stretching to the west. Louisiana Rambles is his richly evocative guide to those journeys.
Sacred Light
Renowned photographer A. J. Meek takes the novitiate on an inspired visual journey with eighty-eight color photographs of the interiors of churches and synagogues located in south Louisiana, mostly along the lower Mississippi River valley. Tourists may crowd the famous European cathedrals such as Notre Dame in Paris and Westminster Abbey in London. Yet the splendors of local churches in America all too often remain cloistered and unheralded. Meek's beautiful photographs correct this oversight for Louisiana, a state that features a great many beautiful and long-standing holy places.
Archaeology of Louisiana
Archaeology of Louisiana provides a groundbreaking and up-to-date overview of archaeology in the Bayou State, including a thorough analysis of the cultures, communities, and people of Louisiana from the Native Americans of 13,000 years ago to the modern historical archaeology of New Orleans.
Louisiana Crawfish
The hunt for red crawfish is the thing, the raison d'etre, of Acadian spring. Introduced to Louisiana by the swamp dwellers of the Atchafalaya Basin, the crawfish is a regional favorite that has spurred a $210 million industry. Whole families work at the same fisheries, and annual crawfish festivals dominate the social calendar. More importantly, no matter the occasion, folks take their boils seriously: they'll endure line cutters, heat and humidity, mosquitoes and high gas prices to procure crawfish for their families' annual backyard boils or their corporate picnics. Join author Sam Irwin as he tells the story--complete with recipes and tall tales--of Louisiana's favorite crustacean: the crawfish.
The Louisiana Coast: Guide to an American Wetland
Hurricane Katrina gave the nation an urgent reminder of the extent and value of Louisiana's wetlands when daily discussions of subsidence and sedimentation revealed how much ordinary coastal processes affect humanity--and vice versa. Now, with a native Louisiana naturalist as a guide, readers can learn how best to enjoy, appreciate, and protect this vanishing landscape.
Louisiana Eats!
On her popular radio show of this name, Poppy Tooker has captured some amazing oral histories about the food of Louisiana. This book brings those words to the page, including interviews with Chef Leah Chase, Randy Fertel of Ruth's Chris, the Roman Candyman, Creole kosher cook Mildred Cover, and more. Mouthwatering recipes and outstanding portraits by world-renowned photographer David Spielman beautifully garnish this delicious addition to Louisiana food literature.
Acadiana
"Acadiana" summons up visions of a legendary and exotic world of moss-draped cypress, cocoa-colored bayous, subtropical wildlife, and spicy indigenous cuisine. The ancestral home of Cajuns and Creoles, this twenty-two-parish area of south Louisiana encompasses a broad range of people, places, and events. In their historical and pictorial tour of the region, author Carl A. Brasseaux and photographer Philip Gould explore in depth this fascinating and complex world.
A Kingdom of Water
A Kingdom of Water is a study of how the United Houma Nation in Louisiana successfully navigated a changing series of political and social landscapes under French, Spanish, British, and American imperial control between 1699 and 2005
The Bayou Strangler
The true story of Louisiana serial killer Ronald Dominique's ten-year murder spree, the men he slayed, and the detectives who hunted him down. In 1997, the bodies of young African American men began turning up in the cane fields of the quiet suburbs of New Orleans.
Louisiana
Covering the lively, even raucous, history of Louisiana from before First Contact through the Elections of 2012, this sixth edition of the classic Louisiana history survey provides an engaging and comprehensive narrative of what is arguably America's most colorful state.
Creole Italian
In Creole Italian, Justin A. Nystrom explores the influence Sicilian immigrants have had on New Orleans foodways. His culinary journey follows these immigrants from their first impressions on Louisiana food culture in the mid-1830s and along their path until the 1970s.
After Katrina
Argues that post-Katrina New Orleans is a key site for exploring competing narratives of American decline and renewal at the beginning of the twenty-first century.
Louisiana Governors
Walter Greaves Cowan and Jack B. McGuire, veteran authorities on the Louisiana political scene, trace the history of the state's leaders from the French and Spanish colonial eras to the present day. Using a variety of sources, including personal interviews with the recent governors, they describe unforgettable personalities.