University of New Orleans Books

Being an amature historian, a resident of New Orleans for 15 years now, and interested in the City's roots, I found this book to be probably the best on the subject I've read thus far. First of all, the book delivers exactly what it claims to on the cover. I've read skimpier and more salatious books on Storyville, none of the caliber and detail that this book offers.

I've made several tours to the site of Storyville and have found the directions in the book to be valuable and intensifyed my tour experience. The excellant photographs were most helpful.

This volume could be the all-time official history of that legendary Red Light District of New Orleans. It is exhaustively researched and illustrated including interviews with some of the surviving colorful characters that inhabited the "Camelot of Sin" that was Storyville. The den of sin takes its name from Alderman Sidney Story who originated the ordinance that provided for a restricted Red Light District. Ironically, he hated having his good name attached to a Red Light District. Today it's the only way his name is remembered. Prior to his legal restrictions the brothels and parlors were spreading throughout New Orleans like a cancer.
Rose illustrated his book with photos, maps, directories, flyers, police reports, legal decisions, cartoons, business cards and almost any other surviving evidence of the now torn down section of the city. The author's research was exhaustive and probably as complete as can be contained in a single book. He combined aerial photos and maps of the area with close-up photos of the exterior and interiors of the many vice businesses. He shows pictures of the interior lushness of some more famous brothels, as well as the filth of some of the cribs. He uses most of the surviving photographic nude and semi-nude portraits that Ernest Bellocq made of some of the prostitutes of the district to make the architectural and interior photos of the bars, dance halls, gambling dens and brothels come to life. Rose also included quite a lot of humor in the form of stories from the time or through his selection of colorful characters to describe in detail. And they were colorful and probably wouldn't have been more colorful or interesting even if their biographies were fictionalized.
By the time the reader finishes this book he will feel like he has actually visited Storyville and walked its streets and listened to and witnessed the birth of New Orleans jazz. In fact, Rose does an excellent job of documenting that birth of Jazz and even tracing its spread to the rest of America. The reader will also have been taken step-by-step through the historical reasons that Storyville was a necessary and probably unavoidable development at that time in American history.
Storyville no longer exists. It was closed down by the U.S. Military in an attempt to keep sailors, soldiers and marines from contracting venereal diseases. After the buildings were empty they were condemned and torn down to be replaced by more desirable buildings in the classic version of urban renewal. It took the full force of the U.S. Military to destroy Storyville because New Orleans was and had always been too corrupt to accomplish the job. Almost from it's founding, the city was flooded with prostitutes and criminals (convicts) shipped from Europe to settle the colony. The riverboat traffic provided an endless supply of sex-starved customers for the fleshpots at the mouth of the Mississippi River.
Like Camelot, Storyville has become a popular legend in the eyes of the population. The legend may indeed become more mythical with the passage of time. Today the very name Storyville can catch the attention of the public and because of that it is frequently used in the titles of fiction and movies.
The reader won't feel that he hasn't received a very generous return on his cost for buying this fascinating non-fiction book. The fact is as interesting as the legend.

What can I say, Al Rose was the best. I wish he was still with us.

This book reads more like a textbook than a novel, but the historical information and photos are anything but boring. There are some wild stories about what these "buiseness women" did to one another that left my mouth gaping. I had no idea prior to reading this book how districts like these thrived. This is a thourough historical account that is worth reading.

I thought the transcripts from the interviews that Mr. Rose held with the (amazingly) still living, former residents and tradespeople were outstanding. Through their words you really got an idea of what life was like and the way they thought about things. He also remained true to his subjects by capturing the dialect in the interviews.
Also, he does a great job with mapping the district using the few remaining photographs and maps of the time in conjunction with the written descriptions of each of the brothels, bars, and cribs. Some of the pictures by Ernest Bellocq that were printed in this book I hadn't seen before.
Overall it's a very good read, and a must for New Orleans history lovers.

Having grown up in New Orleans i have a love for it's history.i've heard about the story of Baroness and it caught my attention. i wasn't disappointed having read this book.

Having grown up in New Orleans and visiting the Pontalba buildings on many many occassions, I thought I knew a bit about the countess. This book has brought up many aspects of her life and the lives of her family that I was totally ignorant of. It is quite fascinating even though there are times when the pace is a bit tedious. It is a bit academic at times, but it is afterall a biography and not a work of narrative fiction. There are aspects in everyone's life that tend to be less than thrilling.
Regardless I will recommend it to my many friends, paticularly those who grew up in New Orleans.

Vella brings to life with splendid detail the life in New Orleans and Paris in the 1800's. Vella is unquestionably a tireless scholar who has dedicated much time and passion into assimilating an astounding amount of archival materials to bring to life the realities and sensibilities of the different ranks of the aristocracies. Sophisticated, realpolitic, Machiavellian. A wonderful work and a great read. This is how history should be written (for non-academia). Well footnoted & bibliographed.

Intimate Enemies: The Two Worlds of the Baroness de Pontalba, by Christina Vella, is one of the best books that I have ever read. I took Professor Vella's class at Tulane University in the Spring of 2000. This book was the basis of the class. I highly recommend this book to anyone who is interested in thorough documentation of facts about a dynamic woman and her family, as well as two great cities, New Orleans and Paris.

Intimate Enemies: The Two Worlds of the Baroness de Pontalba, by Christina Vella, is one of the best books that I have ever read. I took Professor Vella's class at Tulane University in the Spring of 2000. This book was the basis of the class. I highly recommend this book to anyone who is interested in thorough documentation of facts about a dynamic woman and her family, as well as two great cities, New Orleans and Paris.

The recipes are easy to follow and execute. The personal comments are heartwarming. The chocolate cake recipe alone is worth the price of admission -- it's a winner and so is the book!

I am dazzled by the variety and style of the recipes.

The book is easy to follow and the results are astounding. From onion sandwiches to Corn Bisque, Chocolate Cake to Classic meat dishes with a flair. This book is a wonderful departure from the standard theme cookbooks we are all so familiar with.

Linda Larson

The book is delightful to read. The relative who collected the recipies and wrote so eloquently about his uncle and his recipies shows a true flair for entertaining the reader with amusing and helpful referances about how to "bend the rules" of cooking like the pro's so often do to achive unique and savory foods.

He has given us the true secrets of cooking.

The recipies are very imaginative and elegant without being pretentious. How this chef could put together such a collection of diverse and universal ingredients shows a true love of food and the art of cooking.

I recieved a copy of this cookbook for my birthday last month. Talk about a gift that keeps giving. I am able to find a delicious recipie for almost any ocassion. Dinner, brunch, picnics, or special events. The easy going instuctions are trustworthy. ( I don't feel I have to try the recipie before an event.) Secrets of a New Orleans Chef has given me compliments from those I've cooked for I never would have expected.Two friends have requested the name of the book for purchase. One of them is a chef in a local Italian restaurant. He said "my" duck was unbelievable.

I highly recoomend this book for amatures and gourmets alike.

Nicole Bullock

I worked with Chef Tom at the Upperline. I went from New Orleans to cook in the South Pacific and Aspen. Chef Tom's way of doing things is absolutely classic. He had a way of settling on and emphasizing classic combinations of flavour that I have never seen matched; it was instinctive. After knowing Tom I have never met anyone else worthy of the title "chef". His was a flawless palate, as broad as it was deep. It amuses me to see TV chefs lionized in the media when Tom did his work so well with no applause. Chef Tom said once that there is a difference between cookbooks and recipe books; THIS is a cookbook.

I just loved reading this book. I loaned out my original copy, the person to whom I loaned it to moved away, so of course I bought another. It is one of my favorite books, made me wished I lived in New Orleans. Loved the descriptions of the place and although I am a little younger than the author, can relate to pre-Vatican II memories.

Almost Innocent is a rare find. I read this book several times and found something different to love every time. The second novel, Slow Poison is also another classic. Sheila Bosworth is an incredible storyteller. Her characters leap off the pages and become a part of your existance. Her writing flows as smoothly and certainly as a river. This would make a wonderful movie. Please Ms. Bosworth, more!

Sheila Bosworth has written a novel that is deserving of all the praise it has gotten from the other reviewers on this site. The characters are unforgettable and the story unfolds at such a perfect pace. We are introduced and then guided through this intimate family history by Clay-Lee the daughter who shares with the reader the perspective of a child as she describe events and people that are encountered by her parents and their immediate circle. The childhood recollections are structured in such a clever way that the reader anticipates and percieves motivations that are not clearly evident to the young Clay-Lee as narrator. Her "innocence" doesn't prevent us from seeing something more sinsister implicit in the scenes she witnesses.

In addition to the wonderful characters and plot the novel has the added quality of just dripping with New Orleans flavor. If you love the city and are familiar with the settings described the novel provides that added dimension of placing you right there.

After finishing this I immediately ordered Bosworth's other novel Slow Poison. She is a fabulous writer.

Almost Innocent is a rare find. I read this book several times and found something different to love every time. The second novel, Slow Poison is also another classic. Sheila Bosworth is an incredible storyteller. Her characters leap off the pages and become a part of your existance. Her writing flows as smoothly and certainly as a river. This would make a wonderful movie. Please Ms. Bosworth, more!

With this quote from Seneca, author Sheila Bosworth capsulizes the theme of innocence lost and nearly restored in "Almost Innocent," her first novel. Set in New Orleans and evocative of the sights and sounds that any native will recognize, Bosworth's novel traces the process by which the main character, Clay-Lee, attempts to reconstruct her mother's life through stories and memory. In the process of facing herself through her mother's life, Clay-Lee finds redemption for her perceived guilt in her mother's death. Her penitence restores her innocence and allows her to shape her own life and move on. This novel was both entertaining and thought-provoking. I thoroughly enjoyed it and recommend it to anyone who has ever borne the guilt of a burdensome secret--or who simply wants a taste of New Orleans.

Neff, Thomas. "Holding Out and Hanging On: Surviving Hurricane Katrina", University of Missouri Press, 2007.

A Reminder

Amos Lassen

I have had many different kinds of experiences in my life but one that certainly stands out is Hurricane Katrina and I think that is not only because of what I saw but how it so drastically changed my life. There are still pictures in my mind that I do not think I shall ever forget and I am not sure that I want to forget.
Thomas Neff in "Holding Out and Hanging On" allows me to remember and in his photographic essay, he shows us the real impact that Katrina had on the lives of those who went through it. Looking at his photographs is like having a conversation with the people in them. We see moments that go beyond what the camera saw. There is great sensitivity here and a great deal of insight. Many of us who experienced the storm will never forget what we saw but it seems to me that others who were not directly involved need to be reminded of one of the worst disasters in American history. We all must remember Katrina.
Neff not only gives us photographs but also interviews with those affected directly by Katrina and the book is a wonderful testament to those who have been able to rebuild their lives but we must remember that not everyone has been that lucky. A lot has been accomplished since the storm but there is still plenty to do.
Neff's photos and the text shows us what kind of man the author is--he is filled with compassion and courage and an example for all of us As it broke my heart, once again, to see these pictures, I can only imagine what was going on in Neff's mind as he took them. The book documents a disaster--one we should never have to face again.

Neff has produced a magnificent book here of portraits of Katrina victims. These are the REAL people and stories from Katrina!

Thomas Neff is a remarkable photographer and this book sharing the real impact of Katrina on people's lives is powerful, timeless, truthful in an inside and honest way that no casual viewer could comprehend. Neff's vision is sophisticated but pure, trained but revealing in its simplicity, visually poetic with the abhorrent facts of life that have been so cruel to so many. If that weren't enough, there are the essential, heroic and stunningly conveying essays which accompany each image. The photographs share so much comprehensive visual information that one needn't ask for more, but by conveying a much broader and richer context for each image through writing and story telling, a nearly complete cultural mosaic is spun, surrounding the milestone and epic event so unique in US History. This book will stand through time as a classic conveyance of important information about an event that we all know about, but certainly haven't had, until this book provided us with it, an insider's view of the real nitty-gritty that is life, both cruel and beautiful. Way to go, Thomas Neff. Such a brilliant work which we should all feel grateful to comprehend.

Armed with a thorough history of the medium and a flawless technique that has played out over a distinguished career, Mr. Neff has produced a timeless and distinct look into a photographic story untold by the weekend warriors of popular media. The photographs in Holding Out and Hanging On are an extended conversation, empathetic moments that live far beyond the click of the shutter and into a tragedy that has long been forgotten by it's neighbors and countrymen. The photographs are the eye and the heart of a man who is compassionate, realistic, courageous beyond belief and a model for who we should strive to be. As the portraits separate themselves from the time of exposure, the complex clarity and humanity of Neff's photographs are further revealed as a critically important document of the people who lived though Hurricane Katrina as well as an informative and poetic addition to the canon of concerned photography.

Mr. Neff has been my friend and mentor for over ten years now and I could not be more proud to own this necessary book of socially and historically necessary photography that is flawless in it's execution and communion with the spirit and people of New Orleans.

Bradly Dever Treadaway
Faculty Member, The International Center of Photography
New York, NY

The drive down from Chicago to the French Quarter in the canteen left me feeling heavy hearted & speechless. The vast area that hurricane Katrina hit left behind a sea of wasteland like nothing I'd ever seen before. Some areas were completely wiped out where others were only battered, yet the people I met along the way while serving with the Salvation Army in the French Quarter were such a blessing. It was one afternoon in the French Quarter that I met Mr. Neff--I was on my way back from delivering supplies and checking on some of the neighbors. By this time the media was swarming the streets looking for new sensational stories for the headlines. I must say that I did meet a few that tried to report more uplifting personal stories of survival but the majority did not--they were insensitive and disrespectful to the residents. Mr. Neff had a sincere interest in the people he met & photographed, and you can see it in his subjects' eyes: their transparency and trust. Mr. Neff's body of work gives the reader a glimpse into his subjects' lives during this most difficult time. Thank you for recording what words cannot fully express.

A Season of Night is a wonderfully written story of the author's love affair with New Orleans and his personal account of his deliberate decision to move back to an abandoned neighborhood, to embrace his city and refuse to leave her. This is not a story of blame for any government agency, but rather a story of unsung heroes, like the pub and restaurant owners, the reconstruction workers and people like Mr. McNulty himself, that brought New Orleans back to life after the Katrina disaster. I would highly recommend this book and look forward to the author's next book.

Kate O'Riordan
Seattle, Wa.

This book, more than any newspaper article or tv spot, gave an indepth, personal and heartfelt look at the disaster of Katrina. Highly recommended. It covered a range of emotions, love, loss, anger, fear, comraderie, humor............don't miss it. Can't wait for Ian McNulty's next book whatever the topic.

This book will touch you in many ways; it is funny, poignant, enraging, but most often a very graceful book. It is clear that the author values the human experience and has artfully captured the human side of post Katrina. He even attempts a canine perspective of life after the storm with humor and great observational skills. The dark side of the aftermath is evident, but hope is woven through out the pages of this very readable book. When you start it, you won't want to put it down. When you finish it, you will feel like you know the author well and will probably want to read the book again! I highly recommend this book. I am giving it to all my close friends as a way to say I care about them.

Just finished "Season of Night". Too much to savor and process in a capsule review, but a funny, absurd, sad, beautiful and moving work... Fantastically written: serious, simple, unadorned but elegant, clear, precise, emotional but without cloying sentiment or maudlin nonsense, a lucid prose analysis of an impossibly comlex series of crises, personal and universal at once... LOVED it and am in awe of the accomplishment both as a piece of writing and the reality of the story itself... Thank you, Mr. McNulty

Ian McNulty's debut is a must read for those who wondered what New Orleans was really like after Katrina once you go beyond Jazz Fest and the Mardi Gras floats and the sporadic coverage that the recovery has received in the last few years. With a true feel for the grittiness and beauty peeking out from the rubble, McNulty captures a sense of New Orlean's anguish and struggle to rebuild. Most of all, he imparts to the reader a sense of how lonely, sad, depressing and desperate life was for the year following Katrina, and how ordinary people faced with extraordinarily daunting circumstances can huddle together in the dark and share some small piece of happiness. I guarantee you will read it in one sitting and laugh and cry while you do.

Lawrence Powell set out to write a book about the David Duke phenomenon, about how a KKK leader and Nazi could sit in the Louisiana legislature and run for the U.S. Senate as a Republican. But work on the book took him in another direction after he interviewed Anne Levy, a Holocaust survivor who confronted Duke in the state capital. Captivated by Levy's story, Powell has produced a terrifying, poignant and finally a triumphant book about the Holoaust as witnessed through the life of one of its survisors, Anne Levy.

Troubled Memory is a beautifully written and tender account of a personal story that stands as an intimate history of Hitler's final solution. Powell's prose will carry you into the Warsaw and Lodz ghettos and into the vegetable bin where 6-year-old Anne and her sister hid from the SS. This is a book that makes the Holocaust relevant to every reader. It will fill you with horror and wonder, and it will move you to tears.

I am a student at Tulane University and have taken a seminar with Dr. Powell on the Holocaust. This book is the last book that he included on the syllabus for the course, and I understand fully how and why he wrote this book. At first I was a bit leery of his inclusion of his own work in the course, but the work is a great synthesis of traditional Holocaust study and how it pertains to American (particularly Southern) culture today.

The first half of the book largely provides a survey through a personal account of the sociopolitical landscape of World War II-era Eastern Europe: the reasons that the Holocaust occurred, bystanders, perpetrators and victims psychological profiles, as well as giving a very readable human interest story of the narrative of this one particular family. The second half picks up where most Holocaust narratives leave off: the post-war years, the family's emigration to America and the challenges that they faced in New Orleans as Holocaust Survivors, and finally, Anne Levy's battle against David Duke and the formation of the Louisiana Coalition against Nazism and Racism. The first half of the book is essential for understanding her drive in the second half of the book, and Dr. Powell does an excellent job in connecting traditional and new scholarship on just how frighteningly close Louisiana came to David Duke's authority and how important it is to be aware of the ideals that the Louisiana Coalition and Anne Levy espouse.

This book is written in a highly readable manner: the diction is not overly dense nor confusing and the personal story allows non-scholars to enjoy the material as much as a student of history or politics would. It is very obvious that Dr. Powell put an immense amount of personal effort and dedication into this account, and his contribution to the historical documentation of the Holocaust and its impact on contemporary society is a testimony to his skill as a historian.

Troubled Memory is the story of the Skorecki family, which survived the Hoocaust by escaping from the Warsaw Ghetto and going into hiding, intertwined with an accessible history of the Warsaw Ghetto. But is is also the story of Anne Skorecki Levy, 45 years later and transplanted to Louisiana, deciding that she doesn't want Klansman and Holocaust denier David Duke to become the governor of her state. On all three counts - as a tale of survival during the Holocaust, a history of that time and place and the story of little Anne Levy's dogged pursuit of the bigshot politician during his election campaign - the book reads like a taut thriller, a real page-turner from beginning to end.
In its linking of the Holocaust in Poland with the troubled racial history of the American South, Troubled Memory is reminiscent of Styron's Sophie's Choice - except that this is fact, not fiction. It's a compelling, genre-busting book that is not quite like anything you've read, and it leaves you both feeling good and with much to think about.

This story chronicles the survival of small Jewish girls who were hidden in an armoire by their desperate parents in the closing days of the Warsaw ghetto. It easily matches the personal resonance and innocent terror of the far more famous Anne Frank Story.

Even after their final liberation as perhaps the only intact nuclear family to survive that infamous ghetto, the Skorecki family was due one more date with history. Survival, it turns out, was the story within the story. Little Anne Skorecki Levi, the little girl who survived by staying silent inside that armoire struck a blow five decades later for Jewish survival by speaking out against Louisiana's Neo-Nazi gubernatorial candidate David Duke, and helping to engineer his electoral defeat.

This account of Anne's travel along the arc from victim to victor is an inspiration and a reminder that each of us can and must preserve our collective memory, however troubling.

I read books on the Holocaust to try to understand the times, the mileu, the horror, and the suffering. After more than 20 books, I realize that I can only scratch the surface. I will, however, never stop reading because of my fear that someday the deniers and the downgraders might get the upper hand.

Thank you to the the author and Anne Skorecki Levy for relating a story that is very, very moving as well as insightful and timely.

Unlike many works that Alan Lomax had has hand in, this book is great reading, if nothing more. I am not known to be a fan of Alan Lomax and his father as my review of _The Land Where the Blues Began_ attests, but at least Lomax realized what a treasure Jelly Roll Morton was and interviewed him and also had Morton create hours and hours of singing and piano music.


This book offers a digest of hours and hours of interviews with Morton in the late 1930s when Morton was living in Washington. It is supplemented by some very useful interviews Lomax did with New Orleans musicians and their families in the late 1940s. The New Orleans interviews provide very useful direct source material about the social and culture and professional milieu that both Creole and Black musicians in New Orleans Sprang from. A recently written criticial review by a real scholar at the close of the book explains the great limitations of Lomax's selections and writngs here.


Lomax apparently knew little about the real history and processes of New Orleans jazz and life, so that a lot of questions that someone interest in Morton's impact on music are not asked, not just in what Lomax selected to put in this book, but in the larger transcripts of Lomax's interviews and in the monologues Morton dictated to a stenographer as part of this project. Lomax's tendency is to seek out non-musical issue his stereotypical images of Blues and Jazz musicians call forth. This is quite unfortunate because to the end of his life, Morton had a very sophsiticated and articulate understanding of music and was capable of serious discussion of jazz and blues in formal musical terminology. He was a person who seriously thought about music most of the time when he was not playing it.

Recently scholars with new information drawn from new discoveries of Morton's personal archives, correspondence, and musical library as well as the range of interviews with other musicians tend to verify much of what as thought of after these intervews as bragadoccio. Morton probably was the first person to produce written compositions that were Jazz as opposed to rag time. He was certainly playing and writing down blues compositions before Handy. Even the greatest of early Jazz Pianists like James P. Johnson affirmed that both in the days before WWI and in the 1920s Morton outplayed all the great Jazz Pianists.

The examination and performance of the music that Morton wrote in the late 1930s indicates that Morton had not only mastered composition and band arrangement in a style that would have surpassed the most surpassed swing of his day but had written orchestral pieces that prefigured the modal Jazz that Coltrane and others presented in the 1950s. These and other compositions indicate that whatever the fortunes of his public performances, Morton was a serious composer whose skills continued to advance even in his last years when his health collapsed.

Yet flagged by failing health, Morton was never able to organize an orchestra that could have played these pieces. He had been told that he could have lived ten or fifteen more years had he given up performing music, but he wanted to make his music more than he wanted to live.

Finally, Morton WAS cheated out of millions of dollars in royalties by the music industry, especially by the Melrose Brothers and by ASCAP. He was one of the first musicians to challange the way the Mafia-connected music publishers simply robbed musicians of their compositions or did not pay them. Unlike some musicians who suffered quietly or WC Handy who was one of the token Blacks ASCAP paraded around to hide its racism, Morton launched a public campaign in Downbeat and other Jazz magazines that exposed the crimes of ASCAP and music publishers like Melrose.

Until the mid 1940s, ASCAP which collected royalties for compositions from record producers, radio, night clubs, and other places where music was played had a racist setup. Few Black members were admitted although royalties were collected for their music. Morton carried out a public and legal campaign for years to be admitted to ASCAP even though it was collecting millions for the large number of his compositions that had become great hits in the swing era, like the King Porter Stomp that became a standard that any competent string band cut its teeth on.

Once inside ASCAP, he found ASCAP distributed its royalties not based on the money different songs brought royalties but on what a board of ASCAP leaders decided was the cultural worth of different kinds of music. Thus while Broadway and classical writers were getting hundreds of thousands of dollars in royalty payments, Morton received under 200 dollars each of the two years he was living and a member of ASCAP. Morton protested and exposed this publically in the last years of his life and attempted to gather other victims of this system in a law suit. While he was dying and unable to carry on this struggle, his protests and the information he gathered led to congressional investigations in the 1940s that forced an end to discrimination in ASCAP in regard to membership and forced it to distribute royalties based on the sales of the music, not on its "value."

The issue of braggadocio also comes here from the fact that Lomax supplied Morton with a bottle of whiskey for each Interview. Morton was not an alcholic, but those who have studied the transcripts have noted that Morton grew more inaccurate, abrasive, and unreliable longer into the interviews as the booze took effect.

This fits into Alan Lomax's consistent pattern of trying to make sources, particularly Black sources fit into the stereotypes he had about them. Lomax who took many photographs of his folk sources, for example, would force people who preferred being photographed in the Sunday Best, to appear in old work clothes. While Leadbelly actually favored the finest suits and imposed a dress code on Sonny Terry and Brownie MCGhee when they roomed at his New York Home (suits and ties as musicians are professionals and get a case, not a sack for the instrument) Lomax forced him to perform in prison garb or overalls. Lomax also created the fiction that singing and the intercession of his father John Lomax had some relationship with Leadbelly being released fromthe Louisiana penitentary when Leadbelly was released as part of program that automatically reduced prison sentences due to depression-caused cutbacks.

Lomax wanted precisely to convey a picture of Morton filled with whiskey, smokey rooms, and so forth, when Morton was one of the biggest stars of music between 1917 and 1930, performing in some of the most sophisticated venues and a particular favorite with Hollywood film stars of the period.

Despite these criticisms, I urge anyone interested in finding out not only about Jelly Roll Morton, but about the origins of Jazz in New Orleans and the entertainment industry in the earkly 20th Century to read this book. A good supplement, or perhaps a better place to start would be _Jelly's Blues: The Life, Music, and Redemption of Jelly Roll Morton_ by Howard Reich. This can be followed by _Dead Man Blues: Jelly Roll Morton Way Out West by Phil Pastras_.

In spite of Jelly's bragadocio and the author's lack of Jazz background (Lomax was a folklorist) it's a very interesting book. Jelly must have felt injusticed when, in the late thirties, Benny Goodman was earning lots of money with "King Porter's Stomp". But the truth is that, exactly like King Oliver, he was outpaced by the revolution started by Satchmo.

I have always been a fan of Jelly Roll Morton, and I've always looked for books about him. This is by far the best. I loved it. I wish they would re-issue it

Alan Lomax interviewed Jelly Roll while doing an extensive set of recordings shortly before Morton's death. He followed up with a number of interviews with people who knew Jelly Roll. Lomax did a fabulous job of keeping himself out of the way while letting the often colorful information from the interviews tell the story of Jelly's part in the birth of jazz, a story with triumphs, massive ego and ultimate decline. I read a library copy and am buying a copy for a present.

This is one of the rare books for it can be enjoyed by just about anyone who picks it up. Its the amazing account of the life of Jelly Roll Morton, one of the best jazz pianists of all time. Though a braggart and troubled man, he created some of the very best pieces of jazz. The book goes into his life from his childhood and his time working at Storyville to the very troubled end in the early forties. You learn about his family, his troubled relationships with Anita and Mabel and how he went from being wildly successful to dying virtually forgotten. Voodoo, New Orleans, jazz and Creole culture, its all here.

Written with flair and never boring, Mr. Jelly Roll is a book that you will read more than once. Its a look at a legend and a glimpse into a world we can only know of through books and music. Get this if you want a good read and a look at Mr. Morton's life. A true classic.

It is a great book. I recommend it to anyone studying history of the southern United States or just U.S. history.

Hair's deeply insightful story of one man driven to take the most desperate of measures in New Orleans at the turn of the Century (1900) will keep you home and the TV off.

Sit back, fasten your seatbelt and go back to Mississippi after the Civil War. It's a tough place to visit, you sure would not want to live there. Eianr E. Kvaran

This is a big little book well worth reading and well worth owning with a place of honor in the personal library.

Hair does a remarkable job of pulling together the obscure and little-known facts about "Robert Charles", an obscure and little-known historical figure who would have quickly made himself perfectly at home in 1960s America. More importantly, Hair's research and narrative provide a brilliant portrait of a period of American history, approaching the mystery of Robert Charles through a necessarily oblique but dead-on examination of turn of the century racial etiquette in the South; Afro-American attitudes regarding racism, self-defense, identity, militancy, and politics; state and regional economic issues; and the pathological behavior of the white victims of supremacist theories and beliefs. Although the question of who, exactly, was Robert Charles cannot be completely answered---if it could, Hair would have done it---the question of WHY did Robert Charles exist and die as he did is effectively answered through a compelling narrative that proves that history and its writing can be as exciting as any modern story of injustice, oppression, personal dignity in the face of ultimate destruction, and right beaten to ground by actual numerical, and assumed racial, superiority. Hair deserves to be honored for his detective work and meticulous research as well as his ability to make about two hundred pages do the work of some who would have said the same thing, and less eloquently, in six hundred. He should also be commended for refusing to let anything but historical facts and sound reasoning fill in the blank spaces in his history because the temptation to make assumptions in order to flesh out Charles' story must have been a consideration during the writing of the book. This is a small, well-written, rewarding examination of a historical figure and the times that he lived and died in. It's surprising to me that no one has made a movie based upon the book since it has all the drama, suspense, tension, tragedy, and action anyone could possibly hope for regarding a historical figure whose pledge to live and die like a man was a sacred vow and, perhaps, a moral lesson. For those who are aware of Robert F. Williams' place in Afro-American history, Robert Charles will be recognized both as of his time and ahead of it, helping to lay a foundation for the future struggles of others.

Considering the fact that Hair first published this book in the late 1970s or very early 1980s, I am amazed that there are so few reviewers of it. I fervently hope that the lack of reviews is not an indication of a lack of readers for this important historical work.

William Ivy Hair in this fast-paced, readable book accomplishes more in a couple of hundred pages than many of our more ponderous historians have aimed to achieve in far-bulkier works. If future historians learn to write and marshall their facts as well as Hair does here, the tales of our past will remain vivid and important to young readers of the future.

Two years ago today I was in New Orleans, gutting houses for Habitat for Humanity. My son, my brother, his son and I were there for several weeks, and got to see first-hand what the aftermath of Katrina was like. It's similar to childbirth: until you've experienced it first hand, the full impact doesn't really hit you. I had seen the photos and the footage, but as we drove through the 9th Ward on the day we first arrived, I realized NOTHING had prepared me for what I was seeing in front of me, that day, June 18, 2006. It didn't seem as if we were still in America - it was more like being in the aftermath of a war zone in some other country. The wide streets, empty and silent; the school-bus-sized piles of what had been the entire contents of a family's home; the stench that lay over everything (this came from the refrigerators stuffed with food and rotten water: "Katrina Soup", my brother called it). And in the trees that were still upright, if you looked closely, you could see where strands of Mardi Gras beads still hung from people having thrown them up there, in celebration, over a year and a half ago. The book was so brilliant - his photographs bring it all back to me in vivid relief. The one that affected me the most was the one of the shrimp boat sitting at the end of the street. My brother took me to see that same boat the first night we were in New Orleans, and I visited it several times after. And his descriptions - !! The heat, the isolation, the fear, and the adventure of what he was living. God bless his friends and family for saving his e-mails and urging him to publish them. This book is an absolute treasure.

David Spielman's book is both awesome and emotionally jarring. It's as close as one can come to experience Katrina without having been there.

I evacuated, returned to my own Uptown neighborhood eight weeks after the storm... and after just now looking at David's book I'm seeing it all over again. And, I'm seeing things I've never seen (Six Flags under 20+ feet of water). The emails walk you through what it was really like, the photos are reminders of what happened to this American city. All Americans should see these unique photos, this unique perspective, as we continue to try and fathom what happened here. This is the perfect presentation. I don't live in New Orleans anymore for a million reasons... but these photos take me 'home' again, and this is a book you will show your friends for years to come.

Mr. Spielman's approach in presenting the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina is excellent. He guides the reader, using photography, to relate the sequences of events in a very clear, realistic and poignant way, especially, on his photograph depicting the sick and the poor waiting for medical services in a cold morning in Audubon Park in December nearly three months after Hurricane Katrina made landfall. showing a Third World situation inside the world's most advanced and richest country. All because of bureaucratic red tape and FEMA inability to handle a catastrophy of such magnitude.