Louisiana Books

Steamboats on Louisiana's Bayous:
A History and Directory
By: Carl A. Brasseaux and Keith P. Fontenot

This is a well done and much needed book for any one researching the steamboat trade in the Southern Bayou Country of Louisiana. It is also interesting and informative reading for those who study the history of the Cajun Country.

The first half of the book covers an interesting history both of Steam boating on all the Western waters but primarily in the Southwest Bayou country. It also gives a good description of the evolution of the steamboats which plied these waters, due to the unique conditions of the western river trade. The only thing I can see that would have been a great improvement to this section would be a foldout map of the bayou system. The verbal description of this area is very complete but hard to follow without such a map.

The second half of the book consists of a listing of many, but not all, the boats and captains that plied these waters as well as their demise. This collection goes beyond Way's Packet Directory, Lytle List et al. This in itself is an unusual and difficult feat as these boats changed both in names and captains. The research would be very difficult for an individual to undertake on his own and a complete list would be next to impossible.

One downside is that the index is not complete but this can be overcome if you Google the book online and do your search there. You can then use the page number to look up your item of interest, even though the page in question may not be available online. Actually, in a way, this is easier than using the index.

My personal problem was the fact that the book does not cover the Red River and her bayous and tributaries, though the author never did say it did and this is just wishful thinking on my part. I wonder if this important section as well as a map could be in the works......

I highly recommend this book for anyone who has an interest in steamboats in Louisiana. It is a good mixture of both technical and historical information. I have it in my library both for the boats and the history it contains.

Still Waters is a book full of incredibly beautiful photographs that touch your soul. You find yourself turning each page then gazing out into space with a small smile on your face. I found myself going "...this one is my favorite, no! this one!" In the end I knew I had to own this book. The author writes a lovely introduction that enables you to visualize and feel the process and circumstances behind some of the photographs. It is page after page of magic.

I was loaned this book by a friend who is a direct descendent of the author.
The book is full of details about life in the ante bellum South; the family is not a wealthy but they are survivors in a very rural area. The author tells of his early life, as he becomes an adolescent, the War between the States begins.He enlisted in the Cofederate Army and was in active duty until the end. A fantastic story developes after Gen. Robert E. Lee surrenders, and the author and his fellow soldiers from La. make their way back home from N.C.
With minimal formal education he becomes an advanced mathematician winning many awards and involved in the formation of L.S.U. The book is easy to read and contains many historical aspects that are not readliy avaible. It would make a great movie. I highly recommend the story. Lowell Kepp

A subtle collection of poems exploring the photographs of E. J. Bellocq and the author's own creole family history. The poems about Bellocq were, for me, the best part of the book, wonderfully intelligent accounts of these mysterious and surreal portraits of 'Storyville' prostitutes. Bergen's insights are far more sophisticated than those of any other writer I've come across. The section on Creole identity I found less convincing, as it seemed, at times, arbitrary and rather academic. Often, though, the lyrics about the photographs, the imagined 'voices' of Storyville characters and the discursive explorations of the past all worked together to create a resonance worthy of Bellocq's originals.

You will get the most from these poems with the photographs in front of you as you read.

I have waited a long time to write this review. Alice Derry is a professor at Peninsula College in Port Angeles, Washington. She is very humble and quiet about her abilites, but strong about her beliefs and justice.

I am aware of the risks Alice Derry took by choosing to write about her loved ones from the German WWII generation. In a culture bent on a one-way perspective of WWII, it takes courage to even open this book and begin to read.

I made Christmas gifts of several of these books for friends. Some, just friends of friends. All lived through the periods during and after WWII. Alice Derry's writings show the pain and dispair behind the guilt of complacency and denial.

If anyone has a Grandparent, neighbor, or friend who grew up during WWII and is of German descent this is a true gift. It empowers those that have stripped themselves or have stripped of the pride they should have for their herritage and themselves. The pieces in this book are written from a seemingly empathic understanding of the ignored experiences and injustices committed against those assumed to be guilty of the horrors of the haulocaust in WWII Germany; simply by mere association. The general populous of Germany were not all in favor of the political view of Hitler, but were labled with blame. A plague of punishment, guilt, and stigma coat areas of Europe contaminated by Nazi occupation into current times.

Through the works in this book, Alice Derry allows her readers to understand the legacy of WWII from a rare perspective and find ballace. Those I gave this book to have found healing. In the words of my German/Swiss/Austrian friends that I gifted this book to; "She understands; someone finally understands."

This quintessential New England poet brings the same solid ear, wry humor, keen historical sense, and sharp eye for natural and social detail to every poem. He is one of our zestiest poets of things-as-they-are, happily allergic to obscurity, pretension, and gauzy abstraction. Every poem is *placed*: firmly located in time and space, naturally, but also placed with utmost care on the page. His sinewy free verse is given flexibility by his great control of syntax and his diction, as always, is capacious and thickly textured. Calling a poet "readable" these days might seem like damnation with faint praise, but to my mind we need a lot more poetry which combines accessibility, good humor, and intelligence as skillfully as Galvin always does. This collection is both meaty and enjoyable: a great read.

"The Sugar Masters: Planters And Slaves In Louisiana's Cane World, 1820-1860" by Richard Follett (American History Instructor, University of Sussex, England) is an analytical history of the employment of slaves in the sugar cane industry as practiced in Louisiana during the early 19th century. The focus is on labor management practices used to control and exploit a slave-oriented labor system within the contemporary context of capitalism, hierarch, paternalism, and ethics. A seminal contribution to pre-emancipation Louisiana, "The Sugar Masters" is a model of scholarship in terms of the underlying empirical research, as a demographic study, and in expanded our understanding of the social and cultural history of slavery, agricultural, and cultural practices of the era. A very highly recommended addition to academic library collections, "The Sugar Masters" is especially recommended reading for students in the disciplines of Black History, American History, Louisiana History, and American Economic History.

Blake asserted, "I know that This World Is a World of Imagination"; and his contemporary Wordsworth affirmed, "What nobler marvels than the mind / May in life's daily prospect find, / May find or there create?" Blake and Wordsworth of course saw the world with rather different eyes, but as poets their goal was closely similar: to reveal that the interrelationships of consciousness, the senses, and the world--however complex and often troubling or worse--are, in the basic sense of the word, wonderful.
My own eyes, which have been helping me for several decades to study, teach, and write about those two poets and their peers, see Sandy's "Surface Impressions" taking an important place in the tradition of Wordsworth's masterpiece "The Prelude," which, although on its surface an "autobiographical poem," is fundamentally a revelation of how one moment of consciousness unfolds the next, and how those moments cumulatively unfold our time and space and the texture of our experience, in patterns that continually break and re-form into new shapes what is varyingly familiar and mysterious, reassuring and frightening, shared and unique to ourselves--but is always, when recognized well enough, a wonderful living presence. Sandy works his fascinating transformances of apparently autobiographical moments in verse that seems always to be taking the shape of short poems that seem always to be becoming other short poems that almost before we notice have become a long poem so much alive that it seems not to end when the words do.

Shery St. Germain here skillfully combines melancholy and ecstasy, hard environmental science & frank emotional discovery. "Swamp Songs" amounts to creative non-fiction as *bildungsroman* -- a portrait of the artist as a Louisiana woman. In a style enriched by poetic hooks to all manner of sensory intensity, these essays detail how Germain has escaped a family addled by drugs and argument, and the many dangerous temptations of an upbringing in and around New Orleans. Yet at the same time she dramatizes her ineradicable connections to that world, even to the fragile bayou lands and their denizens, animal, vegetable, and mineral; she neglects none of the delights her moss-scarred roots have left her with. These pieces are songs indeed, full of thought to be sure but also, more powerfully, rising and keening straight out of the blood-drenched and ever-endangered swamp-stuff within our ribs.

Robert Outland III tackles a subject that until now, had only been covered in "fits and starts." The gum naval stores industry of the Atlantic and Gulf Coastal states spanned more than 200 years. Yet today, it is little known by those outside the now fading generation that witnessed its last years of backwoods prominence. Outland does an outstanding job of explaining production methods and uses of naval stores. Also, the many times wretched life of the turpentine worker is discussed at length. Often a stepchild in discussions of the South's great timber industry, naval stores finally get a fair, thorough treatment by a worthy historian.