167 of 173 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Mr. Piazza answers his question., November 23, 2005
This review is from: Why New Orleans Matters (Hardcover)
I was born in New Orleans almost six decades ago. I pride myself in having never left the City under threat of a hurricane. And, so, there was no difference with this one the Weather Service named Katrina. A long time ago, I was a police officer and the sense of duty to your City and to your Community stays with you.
And so, I stayed and along with my parents that I took in to my Uptown Apartment, we weathered the storm. It was a tough night but we made it through and on Monday morning felt we were victorious. Even after the levee failed, we remained in the city until Wednesday, August 31, 2005.
The rest is history. I visited the City in September and early October and made my final return in the middle of October to do my part in the rebuilding. This past Saturday (November 19, 2005), I was at the Garden District Book Store to purchase a number of novels by Poppy Z. Brite as gifts to people who assisted me in my travels after Katrina.
I was introduced to Tom Piazza and decided to purchase his novel WHY NEW ORLEANS MATTERS. I am so happy I did. Mr. Piazza is an outsider (a person not born in New Orleans) but this guy sure has it right for his adopted City. He writes about and fully understands New Orleans and the people of New Orleans. And, he does so as if he was born here and spent his whole life walking the streets and enjoying the great experience of living here and at the same time noting the negatives.
Mr. Piazza takes you on a tour of the places the locals hang out. He does it in such a way as to enliven your senses. Whether it is about the architecture, the culinary wizardry of our chefs and cooks, the music, the people, he gets it right. It is not a rosy picture he paints at all times but some of our warts are there and cannot be denied nor does the author cover them up.
This novel was written as the Katrina story unfolded and is still being made each and every day.
The novel also in graphic detail tells of the return to the City and what we found and what we experienced. At least, he did not go into too much detail on the ugly side of a city destroyed by water. The smell of my refrigerator will never leave my memory. The lost of human life is so depressing and hurtful. And, we also lost so many of our pets that, to many, were important segments of our larger family.
The one thing that stands out for me in this very good book about New Orleans and the four legged dog named Katrina is that Mr. Piazza list so many things that make New Orleans so different and so grand. But, in the end, it is not the buildings, the restaurants or the food, the music per se but it is the people who make up the culture of New Orleans. And, that is the reason that it is absolutely mandatory that the rebuilding of this unique City start with the return of the citizens that make the culture so vivacious and life so meaningful and in need of preserving.
New Orleans matters because the people of New Orleans matter.
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81 of 86 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
An Important Book, November 28, 2005
This review is from: Why New Orleans Matters (Hardcover)
Tom Piazza is known for his jazz and music writing, but in fact he is one of the best writers around, period. In "Why New Orleans Matters," he zings one from the heart and hits the bullseye. The book manages to be uplifting, inspiring and heartbreaking all at the same time. For someone who's been to New Orleans several times, I found it both reminded me all over again of why I love the place, while simultaneously illuminating corners of the city and its culture that I didn't know about. And the descriptions of both the author's solo return and a subsequent and devastating trip with his lady to inspect the damage to her house are scalding tour de forces that really make tangible the pain and the loss. More than anything, Piazza's love and passion for the place, the people and the culture comes through--communicating why, as the title says, it matters, and why we must save it. Of course, on an even broader level, I think the fate of New Orleans is emblematic of the battle that is being waged for the soul of the country--as the corporate interests leech what is good and real out of everything, in their singleminded and ultimately short-sighted pursuit of the holy dollar. I think and hope that we can turn the tide, and I think that this book will help in that fight. It makes the stakes clear to anyone who reads it.
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47 of 48 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Passionate, fascinating, necessary, and incomplete, December 27, 2005
This review is from: Why New Orleans Matters (Hardcover)
As a native New Orleanian, I wondered what compelling case Tom Piazza could make to the rest of the nation. I wasn't sure if the book was written as a sort of cathartic love-letter to the city, or as a case for allocation of the funds necessary to right the wrongs that led to the disaster.
This book is more the former than the latter, and it stands on its own as such. It has been my experience that visitors either love or really dislike New Orleans, to be charitable about it. It's the glass-half-full thing. Either you love our slow, beautiful, messy, fun-loving, on-the-surface, play-before-work, family-is-everything city...or you don't. People who value family and culture and a slower, more stop-and-smell-the-roses kind of life, will be enchanted with the city through this book if they've never had the occasion to visit.
People who are all about efficiency, good government, growing economies, antiseptic cleanliness and timeliness won't. That's the bottom line. Either you are a New Orleans kind of person or you aren't.
If there is a point that Piazza manages to drive home, it is how unique our city is, particularly with respect to culture and way of life, and he argues that it merits preservation on those grounds. If you are looking for a balanced treatise examining the pros and cons of the city topographically and scientifically, how the city contributes to the American economy, the reasons for the flooding disaster (and for the record, most New Orleanians feel it was a man-made disaster brought on by Federal engineering errors) -- this book is not it.
It is a passionate plea in rich detail for the preservation of New Orleans and therefore its way of life, with chapters each on food, music, Jazz Fest and Mardi Gras -- all the things locals and tourists love alike. Indeed, I was glad for detailed section on the Mardi-Gras indians pre-parade activities and other tidbits of local culture that most of us have not had the chance to experience. Piazza has spent a large part of his time in New Orleans chasing down music and culture and thankfully chronicles it for the rest of us.
The city's serious problems of crime, corruption and dismal schools are touched upon and glossed over, perhaps the author thinking that this is not the time to delve into those topics. However, these problems are a major impediment to the city's economic growth and viability. Facing them head-on could only help, in my view.
I thought Piazza was particularly heavy-handed towards the upper class and a little too "adoring from the outside" to the down-and-out poor. The plight of the poor is the most important story of Katrina, and thankfully, it is being given the attention that is due. It is also true that self-centered-rich, promenading through life with blinders on, are alive and kicking in New Orleans. As they are everywhere. But there are plenty in New Orleans who care and who give a lot. Those folk get no attention in this book; indeed the book makes it look as though they do not exist.
As they have been throughout the national news media's coverage of Katrina, the middle class are completely ignored in this book. No mention is made of the 90% of the city's population who managed to get out before the storm (other than the author and his wife). As the Times-Picayune and the New York Times have reported -- it now appears that most who stayed behind were offered rides out of the city but chose to stay.
The middle class -- black, white and in-between, are the folks who frantically worked 12 hours before the hurricane boarding up and packing up, and then another 12 hours or more on the road trying to outrun the storm, who ran out of gas or crawled along on the interstate parking lot, who suffered breakdowns and breakups of family caravans, or who drove to and fro trying to dodge the storm.
Like the poor, these people are among the 400,000 now scattered throughout the country, many without homes to come back to or family to spend Christmas with, many lacking the money to fly home (even if they could find hotel rooms). Many folks who lost all of their family photos and treasured posessions; indeed, most of the tangible evidence of their own lives. People who are trying to find jobs, homes and schools -- all in the same place -- wherever they have landed.
True, they have more education, resources and choices than the poor, so their situation is not nearly as dire. But that does not mean that they do not exist and that they are not a part of New Orleans that matters. Reading Piazza's book one would think that they do not.
In New Orleans, having more money *can* mean that you live a at a higher elevation, but there are also plenty of upper-middle-class who had 6-10 feet of water in their half-million dollar homes; even some who perished. These people don't make it into Piazza's book. Completely omitted are the miles and miles of middle-and-upper-class neighborhoods such as Gentilly, New Orleans East and Lakeview that were completely destroyed by Katrina.
These parts of the city may not be as interesting to tourists or transplants like Piazza, but they are interesting to those who lived there their entire lives and believe me, they matter to New Orleans. They comprise a large portion of the city's tax base.
In a nutshell: beautifully written, spot-on, loving, passionate, convincing, but far from telling the whole story of Why New Orleans Matters.
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