Customer Reviews

City of Refuge

5 star:		(35)
4 star:		(17)
3 star:		(10)
2 star:		(4)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

It's been a week since I finished 'City of Refuge' and I am still thinking about the characters and their experiences. For me, this is the mark of a truly memorable reading experience - rare in this day of disposable fiction.

Like most of those posting here, I did not experience Hurricane Katrina firsthand. I watched the coverage on CNN, horrified by the scenes of devastation and human suffering that unfolded before my eyes. I tried to imagine what it had to be like for those who found themselves trapped in their attics or on their roofs. I cried for those lost. And I raged against an administration that would treat this catastrophe with such disregard. This is America, I thought as I watched displaced residents begging for food and help from anyone who could give it to them. Why is my government not there to help them, I cried?

'City of Refuge' brought it all back and more. Not only is the story of actual flood survivors brilliantly depicted, the author has also given us a glimpse into the lives of those displaced by the storm - lucky enough not to lose everything, but still placed in a difficult situation. The juxtaposition of the two stories emphasizes how different life can be for the "haves" and the "have nots."

I really enjoyed the author's detailed descriptions of New Orleans - before and after. However, words really cannot convey the scope of the devastation, and I found myself researching locations noted in the book to see exactly how they were impacted by the storm. What I found gave further meaning to the book.

Check out Google maps and search for any one of the streets in the character SJ's neighborhood (Tennessee St. is a good place to start). Google maps satellite view shows the area after the storm, before any demolition occurred. What you find will shock you. Street after street with houses shattered and tossed about like trash. Then, look at the street views of the same locations. There is nothing left, just vacant lots where once there was a thriving community.

To me, the mark of an outstanding work of fiction is that it makes me think, feel, and want to know more. 'City of Refuge' is all that and more. Kudos to Tom Piazza for bringing us into the "eye of the storm." We cannot forget what happened three years ago and must pledge that nothing like this ever happens in our country again.

City of Refuge is a story of two families as they seek refuge from Hurricane Katrina. The main characters are SJ a black Vietnam Veteran, widower and carpenter living in the lower 9th Ward and Craig Donaldson a white jazz writer, editor and transplant to New Orleans. City of Refuge describes the contrasting experiences of the families of the protagonists as their lives are irreversibly disrupted by Hurricane Katrina.

The experiences of SJ's family are the more gripping and better realized. Inherently this is because SJ's whole family's history and being is interwoven with his family's life in the lower lower 9th , where: "You had a place, a role to fill, a sense of being part of something bigger than yourself, a community." Both emotionally and physically they have much more to lose. In contrast the Donaldson are of the class and mindset where: "The badge of honor is being able to ride above the discomfort, arranging things so that you and your family are not sweating it out in the grease pit with everyone else." Inherently you feel the smallness of the Donaldson's problems compared to SJs making his families troubles all the more poignant. Overall this is a thoughtful examination of class, race, family and community in New Orleans through the lens of the Katrina experience.

About the Author: Award winning author Tom Piazza is himself a New Orleans resident and jazz writer; he was displaced by Katrina, eventually returning to the city and writing the non fiction work Why New Orleans Matters which discusses the cultural importance of restoring New Orleans. This book effectively makes the same argument in fictional though semi-autobiographic form.

His previous fiction works are the novel My Cold War and the short-story collection Blues and Trouble which won the James Michener Award for Fiction. Piazza has also written two listeners guides to jazz music and a compilation of jazz album liner notes. In addition Piazza is a regular writer of liner notes for jazz and rock CDs.

A chance meeting on a festive afternoon between two families, one black and one white, kicks off this tale. It's a simple, yet wonderfully effective look at what makes New Orleans great and what was lost in the flood. There are surely as many different stories of what Katrina meant (and still means) as there were victims of the storm, but the two families and their friends as created by Piazza make for a memorable allegory for the sad reality the world watched unfold a few years ago.

While it was just a few years ago, I had forgotten just how angry the government's fumbling response to the disaster made me. So it's much to Piazza's credit that he wrote the book, because it all deserves to be remembered. The story and its main characters are fictional, but the sights, smells and sounds of New Orleans are delightfully real before the flood and horrifyingly so afterward. Like one of the many delta blues and R&B musicians he name-checks throughout the book, Piazza names names of those responsible - Bush, Chertoff, "Heckuva Job Brownie" - and doesn't mince words regarding what they did and didn't do. (He does invent a fictional talk-radio host as a stand-in for the real ones who offended nearly everyone with their views on the victims - fair enough.)

Against that backdrop, the terrifying experiences of the refugees that we all saw unfolding on television are humanized vividly through the two families. From the calm before the storm to the very point of no return, in New Orleans and on the road and from a safe distance, through the eyes of the victims and those near and far who helped them, and back to the shattered streets afterward, it's all expertly depicted and unflinching. It's not always easy to read, and it shouldn't be, in light of what really happened. But it's definitely a story we should all remember.

After reading the other reviews, which are mostly positive, I feel I must be missing something. Piazza has won numerous awards for his writing - he is an accomplished author, no doubt. And most who have read it seem impressed by City of Refuge.

However, I had to force myself to finish this novel. The story is told to the reader and that is what leaves me cold and uninvolved. I couldn't get into the characters heads, no matter how hard I tried. Instead of being with the characters and being able to get inside their skin, I was a bystander watching from afar.

Portions of the writing are lyrical and well done, but most of the novel is like reading a newspaper report. The book left me cold. I'm sorry to say this because I understand the devastation of Katrina, and I can only imagine the difficulties those who lived in the destroyed area had to contend with.

There is such opportunity for a strong, moving and epic-like story to be told that it seems it would be difficult to miss it. But, unfortunately, this novel does miss the opportunity in my mind. But then, I'm only one person.

How ironic that I am writing a review of 'The City Of Refuge' a novel of Hurricane Katrina, and we are awaiting the father of Hurricanes, Ike, to hit Texas and the Gulf of Mexico.

Two families in The Big Easy, one white, and one black. Their family stories are told through the horror of Katrina and its aftermath. This is the first novel of that time in our history. The Donaldsons and the Williams portray the family dynamics that led each family to their decisions.

Donaldson, the young white man who runs an alternative paper. He loves his home, NOLA. He and his wife, who tolerates New Orleans for her husband's sake, but really it is his city. Their two children deserve to be brought up in a city with excellent schools and that does not describe New Orleans. When news of Katrina and its destruction reaches NOLA, the Donaldsons leave for Mississippi.

Williams is a life long native. He is a carpenter. His sister, Lucy who drinks too much but is much beloved, and her son Wesley, who abuses his women are Williams family. They decide to ride the big storm out. As we all know, there was no riding out of Katrina, and they needed to be evacuated. We feel the pain and the horror as Williams lowers himself with a bed sheet into a boat and then to the Superdome. The horrors, the pain the misery and the fear of the Superdome are told in full. The stench of unwashed bodies and full toilets, to the rage the citizens start to feel are palpable.

Katrina is over and both sides of the families survive. The Donaldsons in Mississippi. The Williams are placed in Houston. The trauma of the past few days have not set in permanently. All are trying to rebuild their lives. Donaldson, so wants to return to his place of birth, New Orleans, but his marriage will not survive if that move is made. The discussions and conversations and the agony of decisions are told in full. Donaldson does reurn to New Oleans on his way to Chicago. The Williams try to make a life for themselves, will it be in Houston or in New Orleans?

"The randomness of Big Easy frivolity is replaced by an indiscriminate catastrophe played out live on CNN, "every narrative twisted and mocked, torn out of any context and flung down next to the grandmother of someone else's narrative. When the anger rises up in Piazza's prose, it's hard to tell where the demoralized citizen ends and the author begins. But Piazza moves the two stories forward with more empathy than rage." Tyrone Beason

This is a novel of love, hope and despair, but most of all the stories of two families whose lives are torn apart by Hurricane Katrina. The city of New Orleans is the overwhelming place of love for both patriarchs. Going back to the city they love gives us overwhelming proof 'Why New Orleans Really Matters'.

Highly Recommended. prisrob 09-12-08

Why New Orleans Matters

My Cold War: A Novel

As someone who watched/read endless media coverage of of Hurricane Katrina in August 2005, I really enjoyed this book. The characters were realistic and believable, and the writing was excellent. The author obviously has very intimate knowledge of the city of New Orleans, and it shows in his writing. I especially enjoyed the juxtaposition of the stories of how a middle-class white family and a working-class black one dealt with the hurricane and it's athermath. The book accurately showed how families were more or less able to cope with the hurricane based on their financial and familial circumstances. I am looking forward to reading more books by this author.

I was a little worried that this book was going to be like one of those films such as "Crash," wherein people from slightly different worlds see their juxtaposed lives culminating in some happy coming together . . . which would have been a little more than I can take. The novel certainly seems to begin in such fashion.

Yet as I read on, I came to admire the book's structure and the many, many comparisons and contrasts between the two primary characters, SJ Williams, a black resident of the city's Ninth Ward, and a white transplant named Craig Donaldson, who feels called to New Orleans out of love for its culture and character. Both represent two primary facets of the New Orleans spirit, and both struggle with aspects of their own families existing before Katrina, and in the additional problems which were the direct result of the hurricane.

"City Of Refuge" is very nicely written. The dialogue feels true, the characters honestly portrayed - some sympathetically, some less so, but none without multiple dimensions. Most of the players display some growth during the book and come to make decisions that are not portrayed in a strict dichotomy of good or bad. I liked this aspect of the book . . . while there is some "hope" after Katrina, the lives the main characters choose (often from limited choices) are not necessarily the exact ones they would have liked. Piazza paints his characters pretty broadly, which could have been disastrous had he not balanced things so perfectly. SJ, the black carpenter and widow, has a strong moral code which compels him to do the "right" thing by his family and community, even though he is sometimes poor at expressing his emotions and taking into account the issues that others have. Craig is kind of the opposite - generous in his enthusiasm, interests and emotions, but a bit selfish in relation to his wife's desires and (caustic but valid) concerns about raising a family in a city plagued with New Orleans' problems. Both characters have good hearts, however, and come to different decisions about their personal fates.

I admire Piazza for humanizing many of the inhumane ways in which New Orleans' citizens were (and sadly still are) treated. He could've gone overboard with this, but I think his slight under-emphasis of these issues, combined with a very typically New Orleans sense of humor about life's tragedies makes their appearance all the more poignant.

"City Of Refuge" is a fairly conventional novel in many ways, but it's still topical and compelling. The characters seemed real to me, and in the few nights in which I read it, I looked forward to learning more about them and their fates.

In CITY OF REFUGE, Tom Piazza gives readers an inside view of two families, one black and one white, from the preparations for the approach of Hurricane Katrina through evacuations to Houston and Chicago and their return back to a beloved city. SJ Williams, a carpenter and widower, takes pride in his home in the Lower Ninth, a place where his father before him had built his own house upon returning from World War II. SJ's nineteen year old nephew, Wesley has the youthful attitude, difficulties and culture of the newer face of the Lower Ninth population, a generation that derives their understanding of identity not so much from themselves but from how others treat them. Even before the disaster, New Orleans itself is the center of struggle within the marriage of Craig Donaldson and his wife Alice. With his love for jazz, Craig has found a refuge in New Orleans, a place where he feels at home. As Alice has become a mother, the city's charm now seems faint as crime, the school system and other urban problems threaten her vision of family. Tom Piazza follows these two families through the preparations, Hurricane Katrina herself, the more devastating flooding from the failed levees to the aftermath and the rebuilding of lives.

Against the voice backdrop of weather forecasting, politicians and talk radio, Tom Piazza gives the reader a more intimate perspective through which to view New Orleans. CITY OF REFUGE paints a portrait of two families tied to New Orleans, the Williamses by its family's connection to the place through history and geography and the Donaldsons as outsiders whose hearts were drawn to the unique cultural legacy of this American city. At first, the reader, now familiar with Katrina from countless news feeds, feels the disconnect between what we know now and the reality faced by families in New Orleans at the time. This disconnect increases as the storm and flooding cut New Orleans off from communication systems and the country itself. As Tom Piazza takes the reader deeper and deeper into the lives of his characters and their experiences, the reader feels a shift. As we become insiders into the lives of not only the evacuees but also those who offer assistance, the reader feels the disconnect of the news and politicians from the lives of individual Americans and families. Juxtaposed to the disconnected partisan politics of blame, the reader sees the intimate moments, even in something so simple as a smile, that unite people, one person to another. CITY OF REFUGE paints a portrait of one specific place, New Orleans and its people as displaced evacuees, with all the unique threads that create its individual flavor, and yet at the same time through his individual characters and their evacuation, Tom Piazza allows the reader to see those things that bind us together as Americans.

Like John Steinbeck's THE GRAPES OF WRATH, Tom Piazza tells a gut-wrenching story of families struggling to cope with a difficult moment in American history. CITY OF REFUGE makes vivid some of the horrifying details of the city's flooding. The New Orleans story feels more personal and more connected to the ground zero lives of families than the picture painted by those living outside. Geography, history and the unique voices of New Orleans combine to tell a story deeply tied to its location. CITY OF REFUGE inspires both a sense of moral outrage as the reader hears the voices of those seeking to profit or refuse responsibility from the natural and man-made disaster. Tom Piazza, however, takes the reader beyond politics and beyond race to a vision of New Orleans and indeed America that both celebrates the individual and the spirit within individuals. Through Wesley's experiences I was brought close to tears as Tom Piazza gives a vision of the values and ties that can bind very different individuals together in ways that transform lives. Although the Donaldsons and Williamses have very different experiences, ones that often made me cringe at the differences, Tom Piazza also succeeds in unveiling those struggles and values that unite the two families. By the end of the novel, I felt a renewed sense of hope. CITY OF REFUGE is a classic, a book to be read centuries from now for both its unique vision of a cultural treasure and its embodiment of the American spirit in the families and those relief workers near and far who touched the lives of those families. Ultimately, Tom Piazza leaves the reader with an insight into New Orleans both deeply personal and also transcendent. Though not always an easy read (I myself experienced a flood quite devastating but minute in its neighborhood scope and the book brought make vivid, painful memories I thought forgotten), CITY OF REFUGE is one of those rewarding books that will remain with me for many years to come, one that takes an event of my own life time, one particular moment in history, and through fiction portrays a depth and richness of spirit emerging in the hearts of the characters in one beautiful final image.

I chose to read this book because my mother lived in New Orleans for several years and New Orleans fills the stories of her youth. What I got was an American classic likely to be read by generations long after its publication. Why? This book does something politics and the news can rarely do. It reaches deeper. It doesn't ignore politics but the politics are reduced to background noise in a very dynamic story. Neither national nor local politicians (and neither party) are spared from responsibility from the disconnect of their dismissal of the realities. The book does not dismiss race but also, I believe it goes beyond the separation into little fragments of people who cannot relate. It also takes New Orleans itself and brings together historic New Orleans, new residents and even those far removed from the site but tied through their relief efforts, through a sense of caring and a sense of values born within individual families. To anyone who has themselves lived through a disaster, this book will not be an easy read. CITY OF REFUGE haunts with its vivid portrayal of the sights and smells of mold and mud. If you are looking for a light read, CITY OF REFUGE is probably not the best choice. On the other hand, if you are looking for one of those books that is both gut-wrenching but also inspiring, one that takes you beyond your own familiar world, CITY OF REFUGE is a book beyond politics and slogans and divides --- a book timeless in its ability to go right to the heart of certain values that have filled the lives of individuals throughout our history.

The famous spirit of New Orleans is encapsulated in this novel by two families whose lives are transformed by the aftermath of Katrina. Much has been written about the devastation, but only someone who has experienced it first-hand could provide the humananity that Tom Piazza provides through two families. By chosing not to focus on the more sensational grusomeness of the situation, Piazza instead takes a more unconventional route and populates his story with characters deciding what to do when they realize their way of life has been changed forever. The choices they make and the reasons for doing so bring the tragedy of New Orleans to vivid reality for readers who have not known that city either before or after the fact. I would imagine that people who live there will find themselves in these characters, and will applaud Piazza's perception and generosity of spirit. Highly recommended.

"It was the morning after Mardi Gras. Ten hours earlier, at midnight, the trucks had come out to clean the streets of the French Quarter, and police cars cruised the streets slowly, announcing that Mardi Gras was officially over. But no announcements had been necessary in the Lower Ninth Ward".

With "City of Refuge" Tom Piazza hits his stride as a novelist. Five years ago I read his first novel "My Cold War" at the suggestion of a friend. I remember being very drawn into the family relationships and sense of place and time Piazza created, while thinking the book as a whole left something to be desired.

City of Refuge does not leave the reader wanting. It is the story of two families living in New Orleans in the days leading up to and following the Katrina disaster. One family is black and one is white. The different way each family prepares for, experiences and recovers from the hurricane serves as the matte painting Piazza uses as the backdrop for this powerful story of race, family and community.

Using the places and events we all remember like the early exodus of those who could leave then the breaking of the levy and the smelly foul hell of the Convention Center and the Superdome, Piazza points out how thin the veneer of civilization is and how shallow lay the fears and resentments we all like to believe are shadows of the past.

The plight of the families as refugees and their emotional connection to the ruined city and each other plays as real as if it were happening to you.

We all know the public Katrina, this is the personal Katrina and Piazza tells the story with intensity, charm and intelligence. I highly recommend this title, and look forward to the author's next work.