Louisiana Books

Thanks to Phil Sandusky, we have a pre-Katrina record of New Orleans seen through the appreciative eye of an artist. The design and execution of his plein air work fits perfectly the appealing clutter and humidity-laden atmosphere of the aging city. His choice of subject matter represents everything from uptown's residences to mid-town breweries and includes the above-the-watertable tombs, Jackson Square monuments, lakefront marinas, riverfront industry, city park views, and more.

Besides this rich array of images, the text is worthwhile reading for its account of life in the city and his discussions of painting technique. From one artist (originally from Louisiana) to another, thanks, Phil!

Phil Sandusky, in the tradition of Claude Monet and other French Impressionists of the late 19th century, insists on painting outdoors, on location, in order to capture the visual experience of the imagery and light of the "fleeting moment" in the life of his subject. The subject in this case is pre-Katrina New Orleans, and this book is a wonderful collection of 150 of Sandusky's works from 1987 to 2002.

I was born in New Orleans, and lived there for twenty-one years, and so I am familiar with many,if not most, of the locations he has captured on canvas. He has done a marvelous job of recording not only what specific sites look like: buildings in the French Quarter, homes in the Garden District, above-ground tombs in the cemeteries, Audobon Park lagoon,scenes of City Park, and much much more . He has I think captured the spirit or feel of the city as I remember it. I can highly recommend this book to anyone who has an attachment to New Orleans, and to anyone with an interest in Impressionist painting. I understand that Sandusky will be coming out with a collection of post-Katrina paintings, and I for one am looking forward to that.

I was so thrilled to find out how truly wonderful this cookbook is and the directions were comprehensive and easy to follow. The end result was FABULOUS New Orleans food!!















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The renowned former food editor of the New Orleans Times-Picayune has put together a cookbook that any serious cook will want to own--all the recipes have been tested and all are tasty--and the illustrations are inviting in themselves

This is THE book about the heart and soul of New Orleans druming styles.

JIM KELTNER: A great feast, the music and the players from New Orleans, a subject so near and dear to my heart, beautifully presented with lots of details and great pictures.

JOSEPH "ZIGABOO" MODELISTE: Even growing up in New Orleans it was difficult to get this information. This book is a solid piece of work and I'm glad to see these influential players getting the recognition they deserve.

STEVE SMITH: New Orleans is the foundation of all drumset playing period! In this well researched and clearly presented book, are the roots of modern day jazz, blues, R&B, and rock drumming (to name a few). Check it out!

ADAM NUSSBAUM: This is not just a book about licks--it's about people. A great source from a deep well, New Orleans.

CHRIS PARKER: Finally an informal, astute, and insightful look at the global and perennial influence of New Orleans music, especially its feel as originated and expounded on by its drummer/composers/arrangers. These are great men. What's not to love?

ROYAL HARTIGAN: This work is a major contribution to the study of African-American heritage, New Orleans traditions, and the soul of 20th-century drumming. Through the photographs, conversations, transcriptions, and the CD, you feel the spirit of New Orleans music, from ragtime, brass bands, and gospel, through funerals, street beats, funk, rhythm and blues, to the modern scene.

VAL WILMER: Just as the unsung denizens of Congo Square used the drum to remind them they had a past and a future, New Orleans music continues to be both historic and contemporary at the same time. Ideas of personal liberation that began with a reminiscence of an African homeland still inspire the city's drummers. Some are featured here. An invaluable and committed book.

JEFF POTTER (Modern Drummer): More than a book/CD of transcriptions and patterns, this is a volume about history. Its two halves are based on videos from DCI's New orleans Drumming series: Herlin Riley's Ragtime and Beyond and Johnny Vidacovich's Street Beats: Modern Applications. Riley guides us through the evolution of New Orleans jazz drumming styles from their riverboat and brass band beginnings to swing, and Vidacovich demonstrates how he blends local traditions into his modern jazz and R&B drumming.

Although writer Dan Thress receives second billing, he deserves equal praise for his knowledgeable interviews and well-researched articles on important Crescent city drummers such as Vernel Fournier, Baby Dodds, Ed Blackwell, James Black, Joseph "Smokey" Johnson, and David Lee.

Also included are discographies and a pullout poster charting the lineage of influential and notable N'awlins drummers from 1873 to the present. Great to play through or just read, this is a cultural mini-encyclopedia.

It's fascinating to re-read my ancestoral history from a historian's perspective. Having heard the "filtered" versions passed down through my family, it was wonderful to get a different account of the events. It's a great read, well put together and was definitely enjoyed!

Sometimes is the truth is stranger than fiction! This is certainly the case with Notorious Woman: The Celebrated Case of Myra Clark Gaines. This book had everything I wanted -- scandalous family secrets, an heir fighting for legitimacy, a struggle through the courts, even a murder -- AND, it's all true! The author re-tells the drama as it unfolded in the courtroom and lets you come to your own conclusion: Was Myra Clark Gaines the true heir to a New Orleans real estate fortune worth millions? You decide.

I don't know how I missed this when it came out.

As the best novel of the Civil War was written by Stephen Crane, who wasn't there, so this brilliant exploration into the aftermath of war comes to us from an author who, at the time he wrote the book, had never been outside the continental United States. It is a novel that John Gardner said was "the kind of novel Hemingway might have written, had he lived to see the way we make war now."

I read this book last year. I couldn't put it down. It was lent to me by my very good friend Peggy. Peg is Jim's sister,(also mentioned in the book). Because I Know Jim Little, it made the book more intriguing. This is a must read, weather you know Jim and his family or not.

I know this man & have spent countless hours with him. Both visiting him in prison (for 4 years, every week) and out in Texas. A remarkable human being. I trust him with my life and I don't say that easily. Jim Little is a unique person. I consider him as close as a brother. This book brought me into his life & I have renmained there. No one could ask for a more devoted friend in life. Jim Little is unique in so many ways.
Trust me, this is a great story. And an incedable individual.
We have been friends since I first met him in prison 13 years ago.

I purchased this book out of curiosity. I used the book to spice up my marriage. I drove my husband, over the weekends, to these places without him having to plan at all. He was very surprised and really enjoyed himself, I must say! I used the book for class field trips. The places are all close by and economical visits. I used the book to take my child places she had never seen. What a surprise for her to have such an unusual weekend! The book is very funny and educational. Thanks, Keith Odom!

I thought the book was very well written. There needs to be an way to update the book online whenever changes are made. I would recommend the book to anyone interested in unusual tours and good food.

I read this book months ago; it has stayed in a warm place in my memory for about a year. Browsing through the stacks at Amazon, I come across it and am surprised that only one person has reviewed it. It's well written, it's an interesting insight into a life different from mine in almost every way -- money, geography, religion, vocabulary, etc. Yet my life and this fictional life are still very American. Reading it, learning about a different America from a great Amercain writer, made me a better person. It gets my highest recommendation.

Glancy is an underratted underknown writer of incredible sensitivity and expression. Her prose is consistently understated, but that doesn't keep it from conveying anguish and complexity in this story of an innocent girl in a gritty landscape. Closest to Kaye Gibbons, but Gibbons is looser. Oprah Oprah, why haven't you read this one???

William Humphrey's second novel The Ordways (1964) is not as well known as his more celebrated first novel Home From the Hill (1958). The novel's early reception suffered from its fragmented structure, as it is separated into 4 distinct sections: In a Country Churchyard, The Stepchild, Sam Ordway's Revenge, and Family Reunion. Like Home From the Hill, the plot is intricate and convoluted. It various digressions, references to unrevealed elements and events, and frequent narrative jumps between past and present slowly reveals the story in bits and pieces.
Humphrey's writing was often compared to Faulkner, an influence Humphrey vigorously denied. Insightful comments from two reviewers are revealing: "[Humphrey's] cosmos is less awry than Faulkner's, and his syntax is far more agreeable," and "Humphrey gives us...a piece of Faulkner in which the obscurities have been clarified and the crooked made straight."
Nearly 40 years after its publication, the loose structure and the Faulknerian inheritance of The Ordways are no longer hindrances to its value. It was unjust to Humphrey that the book was viewed as a shortfall compared to his first.
The story contains two main elements. First is the retold saga of the migration of the Ordway family ancestors from Tennessee to Texas, which is recounted in the section entitled In a Country Churchyard. The saga relates the travails of Civil War soldier Thomas Ordway, his incapacitating injury, his wife Ella's determination to keep the family together, their eventful migration to Texas, and the remainder of their lives in Texas. This remembrance is told during Remembrance Day, a yearly event where families clean cemetery housing the graves of their ancestors. In a Country Churchyard is brilliant writing and story-telling, both emotional and hilarious. Much of the Ordway history is extravagant and over-the-top, yet deeply moving at the same time. Bert Almon, Humphrey's primary literary critic, points out that Humphrey's desire was to satirize a number of southern and western cultural myths: the glorification of the lost southern cause of the Civil War, excessive southern piety to family, glamorization of the Wild West and cowboys, and an obsession with the past. Despite his extra-textual satirical goal, Humphrey does not come off as nasty or sarcastic. In fact, his love and affection are clearly on display. In a Country Churchyard is fiction, writing, and story-telling at its finest.
The second main element is an account spanning nearly 30 years of the kidnapping of Sam Ordway's son Ned by a neighbor, Sam's futile attempt to track down his son and the perpetrator, and at last the reunion of father and son about 30 years after the fact. The Stepchild describes the loss of the child and the step-by-step realization that he has been kidnapped. Slow, yet dramatic, The Stepchild is more straightforward story-telling compared to In a Country Churchyard. However, the events in The Stepchild, frequently and tantalizingly foreshadowed in In a Country Churchyard, make the prologue even more masterful and gives The Stepchild an extra poignancy. Sam Ordway's Revenge is a humorous recital of Sam Ordway's ridiculous search for his son. Ludicrous events happen time and again; this section perhaps reveals Humphrey's satirical intent the most. It does not continue the same sense of drama and devotion of the previous two sections and thus I found it somewhat weaker. Family Reunion is also weak compared to the book's first two sections. It is similarly humorous, capturing the celebrations across Texas for the reunion of Sam and his son Ned. The reunion of father and son provides some relief to the reader after the central tragedy of the kidnapping, but one wonders if the book may have been more powerful had the reunion never occurred.
Mr. Humphrey's lack of literary success was a source of great disappointment to him. I am similarly at a loss why his career did not take off as did those of his less-talented contemporaries. William Humphrey died in August 1997. I hope that his extremely worthy works The Ordways, Home from the Hill, and Farther Off from Heaven will not be forgotten. Everything you could ever want of a writer is there.
Thanks to LSU Press, two of these fine books are still available. A word to the fiction connoisseur - buy them while you can.

This is an important book for every Texan to read because it is a family history so many of us share. William Humphries viidly follows the day-to-day life and adventures of our ancestors from the time they pull up stakes in Arksansas or Alabama to putting down roots in Texas.

In the years after the Civil War, the South faced the challenge of redefining itself. After the initial steps made during Reconstruction, the South eventually embraced the development of a more diversified economy than the cotton-dependent antebellum period. This period is the subject of C. Vann Woodward's classic work, which chronicles the emergence of the region at the end of the 19th century.

Woodward argues that the "New" South constituted a sharp break in Southern history. In the years after Reconstruction, a group of pro-business elites (which Woodward terms "Redeemers") took power in the states of the South. These governments were run frugally, with an eye towards minimizing the tax burden on businessmen and property holders. Their policies in office were designed to maximize the benefits for their class, providing extensive economic breaks for railroads, industries, and insurance companies which succeeded in developing the region's economy. Success came at the expense of educational and social programs, which, starved of funds, failed to provide for the needs of the populace. The result was a region of great poverty, run for the benefit of financiers in the North and a small group of men within the South.

Such iron control was bound to be contested by disadvantaged groups, and Woodward spends several chapters discussing these challenges. The first came during the years immediately after Reconstruction, when the Redeemers struggled for the reins of government with groups seeking social improvements. Reformers won in a few states (most notably in Virginia), but the waning of Northern interest - and with it, federal aid - made theirs a losing struggle. The next challenge came in the 1890s with the rise of Populism, the culmination of the agrarian revolt that began with the Farmers' Alliance movement of the previous decades. While the Populists scored some notable political victories, as Woodward puts it "[i]t was pretty clear by 1892 that the controlling forces in America would be no more reconciled to a Populist South than they had been to a planter-Confederate South or a Carpetbagger-freedman South."

Close on the heels of Populism, however, was Progressivism. Though drawing to some extent on Populism, Progressivism was primarily an urban movement comprised of the middle class, particularly small businessmen. They joined with the remnants of the agrarian protestors to decry the monopolistic economic control of the region by a few (deemed "foreign") capitalist elites. Though the old Redeemer regime succeeded in blunting much of their effort, the Southern progressives did succeed in getting Woodrow Wilson elected to the presidency - the first Southerner to occupy the White House since Andrew Johnson and a powerful symbol of the South's success in returning to the national political scene.

Written over half a century ago, Woodward's book is still the starting point for understanding the modern South, shaping the way we think of the subject as few other books have. Though modified and supplemented by subsequent studies, it still informs how we view the era and how it shaped the country in which we live. As such, it remains indispensable reading for students of American history, as well as those seeking a better understanding of our nation today.

This work, along with the "Strange Career of Jim Crow" form the basis of much of scholarly study on the south for the last 40 years. Most strikingly, he shows the relationship between economic and poltical reform and the issue of race. Demagougery on the issue of race prevented reform movements liket he POpulists from ever proving relief for improverished farmers. Perhaps the most memorable line is "Progressivism was for white men only." He demonstrates how the same people who put in place reforms such as city manager governments, railraod commissions and other "good government reforms" were also the people who disenfrachised blacks and segregated public facilities. Woodward shows clearly the interrelation between race and class in the south at the end of the 19th century. A must read for any student of U.S. history.