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.
