Customer Reviews

Why New Orleans Matters

5 star:		(25)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(4)
1 star:		(5)

 

 

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.

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.

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.

In the wake of hurricane Katrina New Orleans faces losing a lot that has made this city a great and unique American city. This book hits the high points concernig why New Orleans matters and needs to be salvaged. I have lived here for 27 of my 57 years and frankly don't want to live anywhere else. The city charmrd me with it's culture, history, love of food, festiveness, and most of all just plain uniqueness. It's like no other city on earth, not to say it's perfect, it's not and that only adds to the magnetism. A good read I would reccomend to everyone. Jan Jenevein proud New Orleans area resident.

Although I'm not a native New Orleanian and have never lived in the Crescent City for more than six weeks at a time, I love it passionately and go there as often as possible. Hurricane Katrina has blown a hole in my heart. I read Tom Piazza's Why New Orleans Matters straight through in one evening, all the time exclaiming at the fact that Piazza's experiences so closely paralleled my own. This book should be required reading for anybody involved in planning the rebuilding of the city, and especially for those who advise against rebuilding it at all. I have become increasingly angry and frustrated by legislators and out-of-town planning professionals who just don't see why the place they mispronounce "New Or-LEENS" is worth the investment, given its precarious location and the fact that so many of it's citizens are poor. As one such "expert" wrote, "The city of New Orleans should be abandoned to the sea that is going to take it anyway, and those who are displaced should be assimilated into the rest of the United States."
Tom Piazza explains why New Orleans is unique, how the precious and delicate fabric of its French-Spanish-African traditions, its architecture, cuisine, second-line parades, Mardi Gras Indians, brass bands, street musicians, speech patterns, neighborhoods, spirituality, its very look and smell and feel, cannot be treated like some ordinary urban planning problem to which generic "smart growth" and "New Urbanism" solutions apply. Mr. Piazza fears, and so do I, that the result will be a giant, sanitized theme park, a "grotesque caricature of everything that made New Orleans real and beautiful in the first place." In curing the body of the city, we risk killing its soul.

I loved this book. It brought back the wonderful memories we have of this fascinating place-not only the food and music but the arcitecture of the area, the graciousness of the people, and the feeling that it would never change. But it has, and works like this make us aware that we must all work together to help preserve what's left of New Orleans and rebuild in a manner that will not only serve those with full wallets but those of us who live in the areas that were not so affluent. Mr. Piazza seems to understand the need to rebuild with everyone in mind. Why New Orleans Matters is an easy yet difficult book to read; we gave it to many friends for Christmas so they could share in the joy and sorrow we had while reading it.
Let's hope that everyone involved in the rebuilding reads this book, so New Orleans doesn't become another plastic playground with garish lights and highway posters.

Piazza has delivered a moving polemic on New Orleans culture and history that extends in its wider concerns to considerations of what makes a community and, understanding that, our nation. Piazza's voice is clear, engaging and subtle. That his book, in the fine American tradition of pamphleteering, was produced so hard upon devastating personal circumstances, one can regard it, in its literate way, as an example of divine speech; a voice larger than the speaker, a gift of the gods all would do well to attend.

How do you describe a city's "soul"? Read this and find out. Piazza captures the essence of New Orleans and its current wrecked and bleeding body. I don't know how to get 5's; but the book breaks your heart and describes a good friend with a serious illness, perhaps near death, lovingly and passionately.

If you don't read it:buy it and leave it on a coffee table so visitors can read it.

Metairie, LA In an adjacent parish (county) but when out of town we all say we're from "New Orleans" because we are. We just sleep somewhere else.

An incredible reading experience. This author really knows his craft; he brought the city alive to me--its people, its culture, its sights ... even its smells--in a way I would not have thought anyone could do with words alone.

I've never been there, so have only had glimpses of this unique city ... through Mardi Gras scenes on TV, in movies, and in pictures that friends have sent me over the Internet following their vacations there.

What an outstanding, fun place to visit, I always thought, and then went on about my business. It was just another wonderful city in a country filled with wonderful cities; a place to consider visiting one day.

I took it for granted New Orleans would always be there, but now any hopes for visiting there will have to be postponed while the master plans for resurrection are put in place.

AND IT WILL BE RESURRECTED! With so many caring people with their brilliant ideas combining efforts, New Orleans will rise again.

Mr. Piazza's book is a valuable contribution to the cause. He seems to truly understand, to grasp the BIG PICTURE and to understand just WHY NEW ORLEANS MATTERS ... which is the perfect title for his book.

Piazza offers valuable thought-provoking ideas to everyone involved in the rebuilding process. After reading your copy, pass it along. Everyone needs to be aware of what's happening as the city struggles to save itself, and to, hopefully, become even greater.

A wonderful read for those of us that love New Orleans. Mr. Piazza did a wonderful job of taking me back in my memories of a city that is so rich in culture, history, and cuisine. He describes the real New Orleans and not the city that is usually portrayed by the media.