Louisiana Books

Latin Jazz is a creative, sensitive look into the life of a Cuban family living in Los Angeles and the struggles they face in reconciling their current life with what they had and could have had in pre-revolution Cuba. This is an absolutely wonderful book. I urge everyone to find a copy and read it--you won't be sorry.

Shows case after case that this slick attorney won because he cared so much and was willing to take on the "impossible," including the first case of sexual abuse by a priest.

Dee Miller
www.takecourage.org

Once in a while we are blessed to have someone bestow upon us the immeasurable gift of enlightenment concerning the mislaid contributions of people who have rendered great service to America. Too often Afrikan Americans have been misrepresented or removed from history. Professor Wilson has served the discipline of history well in her account of Charles Hatfield, his antecedents, Louisiana history and the Southern University Law School. Mr. Hatfield never graduated from law school, but his struggle to achieve opened the door for many others. Fortunately, his contribution was recognized by the University in his lifetime.
The author is not parochial in her approach. She recounts the Hatfield origins in Europe, the family arrival in America, their travel to Louisiana and how they acquitted themselves there. She is expansive in her telling of the Haitian Revolution to portray Louisiana of the nineteenth century, what it meant to Hatfield, and by extension black and white Americans of that era.
George and Eliza Douse's entrepreneurship (Orange Hill) shows that business and profession have always been integral to the Afrikan in America,. The location of the inn is historically interesting; Highway 61's centrality in America intertwines the Mississippi River and the Blues. Again, the summation of the Haitian Revolution contributed to a greater understanding of the Douse's prioritizing the documentation of their free status. This recounting also emphasizes the panic element in the South regarding white's security and the status of Afrikans in America.
Professor Wilson has "humanized" individuals such as Homer Plessy by placing them in a community context, as opposed to just being aware of them as a name on legal brief. Other individuals such as Albion Tourgeé are brought back to our consciousness. Tourgeé, as well as being a great attorney, was an exceptional socially conscious novelist. He brought a consciousness concerning racism, with a talent that Scott Turow and John Grisham as lawyer/authors are recognized for today.
The need for black professional graduates is presented brilliantly by the recounting of Louisiana's bloody political struggle over the voting franchise and subsequent political entrenchment. This bloodshed occupied a full decade and part of another. These events were repeated in other black political strongholds such as South Carolina and North Carolina in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
Against this background, Professor Wilson charts the progress of these warriors who made the law their weapon of choice. Even as they chose their weapon, their adversary (white supremacy) reached into their arsenal of obfuscation. Blacks wishing to pursue the law in their home states were forced by the political climate to attend schools outside of their home states or forego that education. The challenge in various states is aptly recorded and the struggle in Louisiana can be placed into focus.
The segregationists, however, weren't through. They utilized the classic American solution: throw money at a problem, buy off the opposition. They told the presidents of the black colleges that the white institutions collectively would contribute funds for the enrollment of black students, provided that those administrators would not support black attendance at state (white) schools in furtherance of professional education, i.e. law, medicine, dentistry, et cetera.
The black administrators found themselves on the horns of a dilemma with the sword of Damocles hovering overhead. These administrators knew more acutely than others that separate but equal was inherently unequal. They also knew that some professional education was better than none. Reluctantly, the arrangement was acquiesced to. In some instances where the admission to the state schools was blocked by custom (de facto segregation), black law schools were instituted, i.e. Louisiana State University/Southern University School of Law. Whiatever choice these administrators made, Professor Wilson's cogent presentation of the problem informs the reader's capacity to grasp the issue and understand the dynamics underlying positions and actions taken.
Professor Wilson initially intended to produce a biographical sketch of Attorney Louis Berry, whom you will meet in the book, fortunately she undertook the telling of this Hatfield saga. This respect for African American history speaks well for the future. Mainstream America is bereft of appreciation for truth and justice. How refreshing that there is a voice at an historically black university that will take us forward into our past and back into our future..
Let us hope that Professor Wilson will take on other aspects of the quest for justice in American history and thereby enrich us all.


Adisa Makalani

Hats off to Professor Jeansonne for his fascinating and thorough biography of Leander Perez. Perez and I may not have seen eye to eye on many issues, but I can't help but think that - our political differences be damned - Leander Perez was a flat-out great guy!

The way this novel is written, it's as if one is being led through a series of dream-sequences. Which isn't to say it's not wonderful - in fact, I dream about being able to write as well as this - but it does make for a little confusing reading. It's well worth it, though. There's real beauty and hurt here, and it's well worth the money.

This guide rates essential, great and good recordings from all the major cajun and zydeco artists. Also includes a "Top Ten" for each genre. The third section is a resource guide with publications, books, videos and web sites relating to cajun and zydeco music.

This is the perfect book to help someone move beyond the "Big Easy" soundtrack and start building a cajun or zydeco music collection.

Due to recent interest in Elinor Wylie expressed by one of my favorite contemporary poets, I pulled this book off my shelves again and decided to give Wylie another think. For some, she has been the quintessential 1920s figure, her extravagant private life overshadowing her work, and for others, her work is just plain awful, phony and ornamented with coat after coat of bright "beauty" paint. Whereas her contemporary Amy Lowell idolized Keats, Wylie fell for Shelley in a big way, and seems to have believed herself a modern day, female, Alastor. He has her "guardian spirit," her "archangel." "Poets," Shelley said, "are the unacknowledged legislators of the world," and Wylie lived her life copiously, as though exercising her right to law at every moment.

She had a glorious red haired beauty, like Nicole Kidman, and everywhere she went she made heads turn. She married three times, loving them and leaving them, and had left her third husband by the time she died, throwing herself over the windmill in pursuit of a married British acquaintance. Shockingly for her time, when she left husband #1, she left behind her young 3 year old son, Philip, who sadly enough committed suicide a few years after Wylie's death. He showed up for her funeral, aged 21, impressing all her friends with his lack of resentment and his curiosity. Cecil Beaton photographed Elinor Wylie, and Thomas Wolfe included an unkind sketch of her in THE WEB AND THE ROCK. She felt personally hurt if anyone said anything nice about a third person, for that compliment belonged to her, to herself alone. She might have been difficult to deal with at times, but her presence was undeniable.

Elinor Wylie's poetry has its ups and downs, but the best of it is a remarkable reminder that the so-called "freaks" of literary history have a better chance of being appreciated today than a whole album full of well-crafted representatives. (Perhaps because of the tension that still clings, like Spanish moss, to every line.) Writing across history, Wylie wound up transcending it to a certain extent, though as I say, not everything she wrote is very good.

But even the bad stuff is interesting and Judith Farr makes a spirited case for Wylie as a romantic novelist, going against the grain of the modernism of Dos Passos, Faulkner, Josephine Herbst. Like Isak Dinesen, her prose writing is studded with strange images, obsessed men and women, a sometimes treacly, sometimes trenchant vocabulary and diction. Virginia Woolf despised her, writing to Vita that Elinor was a "hatchet-minded, cadaverous, acid voiced, bare-boned, spavined, patriotic, nasal, thick legged American." Hmmm, threatened much, Virginia Woolf?

Chance Harvey has produced a real page-turner for devotees of New Orleans literature. Lyle Saxon's stature as one of the inventors of the New Orleans and Louisiana image (along with Lafcadio Hearn, Grace King and G.W. Cable) is well-known; but the man behind the mask is not. Ms. Harvey's narrative is well-balanced-she never loses perspective or sympathy for this self-tormented soul as he descends into alcoholism and depression. His relationships with Sherwood Anderson and William Faulkner are well described, as is the dawn of the Roaring 20s in New York.

Nits I would I pick-and these are minor: There should have been a few more pages about his influence on the revival of the French Quarter in the 1920s. His influence on, and unselfish patronage of, struggling writers is alluded to but never brightly illuminated. Also, an afterwords listing the further lives and fates of his close friends would have been a nice coda.

All in all, this is one of those essential books for those who want to 'drill down' into the image and literary richness of New Orleans and Louisiana.

If you think "Southern Living" is just your mother's favorite magazine, read this book by the couple of crazy guys who started it. Logue and McCalla's hilarious back-and-forth is just one of the many attractions of this terrific story. Their irreverence about one of the New South's beloved institutions is refreshing, and their insights into the magazine business are like a short course in publishing smarts. A great read!

This book fills a definite gap in American literary history. It is the first full-length study of a man who was perhaps more representative of the late ninteenth-century literary scene than Twain, Howells, or James.

Thompson was reared in the Cherokee country of Georgia. He spent much of his time out of doors and throughout his life never lot his love of nature. In 1868 he moved to Indiana where he alternately practiced law and civil engineering. His urge to write was strong, however, and he abandonned both professions to make a career of writing.

Hundreds of articles and poems followed, in Atlantic, Independent, and other publications. among the novels he published were A banker of Bankersville: A novel (Romance series), A fortnight of folly, and the most successful, ALICE OF OLD VENCENNES, which sold more than 350,000 copies.

Although Thompson was a literary success, he was never able to support his family properly, nor did he ever feel accepted by the eastern "establishment" represented by the Century, which seldom took his work. Nevertheless, he was an extremely popular lecturer, receiving standing ovations at many eastern halls on the Chatauqua circuit.

Some contemporaries considered him a genius, for he was a woodsman, lawyer, politician, engineer, scientist, poet, critic, and novelist. Others found him only a gadfly of the literary journls and a slick and hasty writer. In any case, his was one of the strogest and most heeded voices in the "genteel" reaction to realism.

Wheeler thoroughly analyzes Thompson as naturalist, poet, critic, and novelist and finds him, not surprisingly, a writer of the second rank. Yet as a weathervane indicating the direction of the literary wind, he was unsurpassed. Therein lies his value today. Thompson's work, as illuminated in this study, presents as excellent index of the real temper of American literature from 1875 to 1900.
--- from book's dustjacket