Customer Reviews

Bayou Farewell: The Rich Life and Tragic Death of Louisiana's Cajun Coast

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1 star:		(1)

 

 

A very well read friend of mine in recommending this book said it is not only a wonderful book about Louisiana and its people, but maybe the best book he has ever read period. On such a recommendation I immediately ordered a copy.

And now I see why my friend loved the book. what's not to like.
The author highlights the serious coastal erosion problem we have in Louisiana by getting invovled with a lot of the people affected by the pending disaster. He visits them in their homes and rides with them on their oyster and shripmp boats.
One gets a real insight into the Cajun culture.

After reading the book I realized that I hadn't been down in the bayous for awhile. So, I made a point to get down there and reexperience the unique place that it is. Bayou Farewell is that kind of a book.

One thing, though, if you have been consdiering changing carreers to become a crabber, you might oughta read this book first. Crabbing is a rough way to go.

A beautiful and sad book about the disappearance of Louisiana's bayou country, and with it, the way of life of the people who live there, the Cajun, Houma and Vietnamese fishermen and shrimpers who provide us with an amazin 30% of America's annual seafood harvest. Thanks to levees on the Mississippi, oil company canals, and other interference with nature, coastal Louisiana is losing land the size of Manhattan every year. The land is sinking, the barrier islands disappearing, and with them go protection against hurricanes, resting places for migratory birds, and a seafood-rich ecosystem.

That it is possible to halt the destruction of this habitat is known. The Atchafalaya River, Louisiana's second largest, still pours silt from its mouth to form new land, and small diversion projects are helping. But more and major diversions of the Mississippi, to allow it once again to build up the coast instead of dumping its silt over the continental shelf, must happen and happen quickly before it is too late.

Before, in the words of one shrimper, "Dere won't be no more nothin' left anymore, forever".

Mike Tidwell - the celebrated author of In the Mountains of Heaven, Amazon Stranger, and The Ponds of Kalambayi - has written a compelling book on the Cajun coast of Louisiana, that, in light of Hurricane Katrina, could not be more timely. Unbeknownst to Tidwell when he began this expose, the coast was already eroding and joining the Gulf of Mexico, making it the fastest disappearing landmass on Earth.

Tidwell's travelogue introduces us to the eclectic group of people who populate the area: the Cajun men and women who work the seasonal shrimp harvest, the Vietnamese fishermen, and the Houma Indians who were driven to the farthest ends of the bayou by the first European settlers. He describes the food, the music, the culture, and the lifestyle of those who call the bayou home.

The book was intended as a reminder of how much we stood to lose if we failed to address the environmental problems facing this unique region. Due to Katrina, it may now serve as a recollection of what we have now lost.

Although I daily witness the results of over-engineering on the Upper Mississippi River as backwaters fill in, wetlands disappear, floods rise higher and faster, and various species take to higher ground (thanks to the devastation caused by maintaining a 9 foot channel), I was astonished by the opening pages of Tidwell's Bayou Farewell. He quotes a Louisian shrimper who claims, "Every twenty minutes or so, a football field of land turns to water in Louisiana."

Given recent scandals involving Army Corps of Enngineers book-cooks and their persistent efforts to spend enormous sums of taxpayer money to extend and add additional levies and locks and dams, Tidwell's book offers the most powerful foil in the form of well-researched facts and compelling life stories from those who live in the bayou.

If you care about this third largest river in the world, if you care about ecosystems and environment, read this book. I've sent copies to congress members and senators urging them to propose or at least support legislation halting coastal erosion and further engineering of the Mississippi.

I saw the author of NBC-TV's "Meet the Press" this week and had bought the book immediately...and coudn't put it down. The author explains why Louisiana is in in the awful state that it is..and how the problems are mostly man-made...

In this book he explains...what you DON'T know about Katrina and the Gulf Coast: Why was the destruction so severe? Why was this NOT a natural disaster but one created by a century of destructive dike-building along the Mississippi River.

He answers the questions many in the media are failing to address: Why is New Orleans below sea level to begin with? Why had Louisiana's barrier islands largely vanished long before Katrina hit?

He outlines the only plan that has any chance of saving New Orleans from another nightmare of this sort: Building bigger dikes and cleaning up the debris of the city is NOT a solution. We have to do something human beings have never done before: Harness the great Mississippi to surgically create a buffer of new land between New Orleans and the Gulf.

He explains why Katrina is rapidly turning into a September 11th moment for this country: After this hurricane, nothing in America will ever be the same again.

He explains why gas prices are now soaring and our economy is about to suffer significantly in our manufacturing and agricultural export sectors.

And he explains why another threat, global warming, made Katrina so severe and why all the great coastal cities of the world -- New York, Shanghai, Bombay, Gadansk -- will look just like New Orleans 75 years from now unless we switch soon to energy sources free of greenhouse gases.

A MUST READ for anyone interested in what's happening now in New Orleans.

As a resident of Louisiana, I've often heard the term 'coastal erosion' thrown around in the news, but I never really knew enough to be concerned. However, this book brought to light the incredible scale of the situation, and the urgency required to save the coast of Louisiana. "Bayou Farewell" explains how Louisiana is disappearing at a rate of 25 square miles per year, and at the same time reveals the Cajun people and culture endangered by this very problem. This book is a must-read for any citizen of Louisiana or the United States, as something must be done before it is too late.

A Washington, D.C., area resident, Tidwell came to Louisiana to write a story for the Washington Post about hitch-hiking on Cajun Country shrimp boats.

But what he found was the greatest untold story in America, one about which he and his associates had never heard a single word  the death of the Louisiana coast. ...Tidwell came in with no preconceived ideas about the environmental disaster along the Louisiana coast.

The marsh, however, grabbed him with her cord-grass fingers, and pulled him into herself. She showed him her blanched oak skeletons that stand defiant and scream like sentinels, her deeply dredged canals that fester like scars on the skin of an old mother, and her beaches that are being stripped of their load with the efficiency of a thousand miners.

The marsh cried for Tidwell  an outsider  to be her voice, and hes answered the call.

Bayou Farewell is an amazing book. Actually, amazing isnt adequately superlative. Its an astounding book that ought to be required reading in every high school in Louisiana, if not the nation.

It was a book only a non-Louisianian could have written, and Tidwell, with his mastery of the English language and breathtakingly descriptive prose, was perfect for the task. The marsh  the mother of our Louisiana culture  knew what she was doing, even in this hour as she lay on her death bed.

And she is, indeed, on her death bed.

The author brings the coastal erosion disaster to a national audience by giving it life through the words and actions of the people who live in the marshes and watch helplessly as the Gulf day by day nibbles its way toward their homes.

Bayou Farewell by Mike Tidwell is a first-rate book and highly recommended. This book is about the loss of land along coastal Louisiana. At a rate of about 25 sqaure miles (or more) per year, Louisiana is losing the shallow water estuary that both supports a very productive fishing industry and offers storm surge protection during hurricanes. The reasons for the loss of land are presented in the book. With the sense of a road-trip adventurer, Mike Tidwell researched this issue by hitch-hiking his way up and down the bayous so that he could talk to and gather information from residents, fishermen, and scientists. The result is a report that combines scientific facts with cultural insight into what makes this region of the US a national treasure. Every American should read this book because this is a national issue that rarely gets reported in the media. If you like seafood, enjoy Cajun culture or like to visit New Orleans, then you should read this book. I particularly appreciated Mike Tidwell's ability to weave scientific discussions (e.g., river geomorphology) with cultural information such as the annual blessing of the fleet. This is an engaging and enlightening book. Read it soon before the story comes to a tragic ending.

Mike Tidwell brings a poignant, foretelling account of the land erosion along the Mississippi Delta, urging land restoration before the sea wipes it away. His call to action is no doubt now the sad realization of all he saw coming way before Hurricane Katrina ever hit the area. Masses and acres of land have been literally washed away each hour for a long time. An entire culture rich with the invention of Jazz, Cajun food, and the poignant stories shared by the natives of this land is a deep, heart-felt read that is heart opening, and mind blowing in the aftermath of his genius, humane ecological requests for preparation, land re-building, and restoration.

This is one of those books that stays in your heart, and will hopefully begin a stronger call to action for those who make the decisions about severe land erosion before it's too late. This is an outstanding book, and one that you will want to keep and recommend to others.
Both this book and the author deserve 10 stars for this direly needed contribution to humanity and the land upon which we live.

An amazing, eye-opening book by an amazing writer. As a native of Louisiana I was amazed at how little I knew about the erosion of the coast. The future of my culture depends on stories like this to educate the next generation.