The History Book Club discussion

This is a thread dedicated to the state of Louisiana.

You may add books that take place in this state, are about this state, have a scene that takes place in this state or have events where this state is mentioned. There is no self promotion on the History Book Club.

Hard to imagine any examination of Louisiana history without mention of this man.

by Richard D. White Jr.
From the moment he took office as governor in 1928 to the day an assassin’s bullet cut him down in 1935, Huey Long wielded all but dictatorial control over the state of Louisiana. A man of shameless ambition and ruthless vindictiveness, Long orchestrated elections, hired and fired thousands at will, and deployed the state militia as his personal police force. And yet, paradoxically, as governor and later as senator, Long did more good for the state’s poor and uneducated than any politician before or since. Outrageous demagogue or charismatic visionary? In this powerful new biography, Richard D. White, Jr., brings Huey Long to life in all his blazing, controversial glory.
White taps invaluable new source material to present a fresh, vivid portrait of both the man and the Depression era that catapulted him to fame. From his boyhood in dirt-poor Winn Parish, Long knew he was destined for power–the problem was how to get it fast enough to satisfy his insatiable appetite. With cunning and crudity unheard of in Louisiana politics, Long crushed his opponents in the 1928 gubernatorial race, then immediately set about tightening his iron grip. The press attacked him viciously, the oil companies howled for his blood after he pushed through a controversial oil processing tax, but Long had the adulation of the people. In 1930, the Kingfish got himself elected senator, and then there was no stopping him.
White’s account of Long’s heyday unfolds with the mesmerizing intensity of a movie. Pegged by President Roosevelt as “one of the two most dangerous men in the country,” Long organized a radical movement to redistribute money through his Share OurWealth Society–and his gospel of pensions for all, a shorter workweek, and free college spread like wildfire. The Louisiana poor already worshiped him for building thousands of miles of roads and funding schools, hospitals, and universities; his outrageous antics on the Senate floor gained him a growing national base. By 1935, despite a barrage of corruption investigations, Huey Long announced that he was running for president.
In the end, Long was a tragic hero–a power addict who squandered his genius and came close to destroying the very foundation of democratic rule. Kingfish is a balanced, lucid, and absolutely spellbinding portrait of the life and times of the most incendiary figure in the history of American politics.

New Orleans, the great storied city of Louisiana. Mardi Gras is so much more than an overdone college spring break trip, it has years of rich history.

by Henri Schindler
From Twelfth Night (6 January) to Mardi Gras, New Orleans lives for her Carnival - a brilliant season of balls, revelry, costuming, and parades. Carnival artist and historian Henri Schindler offers a stunning panorama of Mardi Gras' evolution and its exuberant diversity - the early Creole cavalcades; the torchlit processions of the Mistick Krewe of Comus; the rise of Rex, King of the Carnival; fabulous tableaux balls, Carnival royalty; Storyville and the Baby Dolls; Les Mysterieuses, the first female society; and African-American creations - the Zulu Social Aid and Pleasure Club, and Mardi Gras Indians. The artistry, the joyous spirit, and strange opulence of Mardi Gras' Golden Age are revived in a dazzling profusion of illustrations, most of them published for the first time - beautifully finished watercolor designs of floats, costumes, and ball invitations, vintage photographs, lithographs, and prints.

A city with a past, even in saloons.
by Kerri McCaffety
Obituary Cocktail pours out the story of New Orleans and of such local phenomena as Mardi Gras, Quadroon Balls, and the world's first cocktail. Obituary Cocktail reveals recipes for long-time favorites like the Ramos Gin Fizz and the Sazerac, as well as historic drinks that have not been tasted for 100 years, like the strange poison the book is named for. From the French Quarter's elegant Arnaud's to the Ninth Ward's eccentric Saturn Bar, from the world-famous Pat O'Brien's to the obscure Bud Rip's Obituary Cocktail dispels erroneous bar folklore and tells the true stories that prove even more fascinating.

Music history is alive and well in the Crescent City.

by William Carter
On St. Peter street, in the heart of the French Quarter in New Orleans, stands Preservation Hall, an institution unique in American cultural and musical life. In a historic building, the pioneers of traditonal jazz have played their music nearly every night since the 1960s. William Carter tells the story of the hall itself, the personalities who ran it and, above all, the music and musicians of New Orleans

I have this on my to-read list, it looks good.

by Ned Sublette
Offering a new perspective on the unique cultural influences of New Orleans, this entertaining history captures the soul of the city and reveals its impact on the rest of the nation. Focused on New Orleans’ first century of existence, it presents a comprehensive, chronological narrative of the political, cultural, and musical development of Louisiana’s early years. This innovative history tracks the important roots of American music back to the swamp town, making clear the effects of centuries-long struggles among France, Spain, and England on the city’s unique culture. It also reveals the origins of jazz and the city’s eclectic musical influences, including the role of the slave trade. Featuring little-known facts about the cultural development of New Orleans—such as the real significance of gumbo, the origins of the tango, and the first appearance of the words vaudeville and voodoo—this rich historical narrative explains how New Orleans’ colonial influences still shape the city today.

These are great adds Alisa. You have started this thread off with tremendous alacrity.

Thanks Bentley. I find this part of the country fascinating.

The unique geographic position of the state means they are subject to all sorts of forces of nature, and as we know all too well from current events the power of the Mississippi River can be considerable. Here is a book about the great flood of 1927. It's still on my to-read list but have heard great things about it.

by John M. Barry
"(This) gripping account of the mammoth flooding of 1927 that devastated Mississippi and Louisiana and sent political shock waves to Washington . . . is a brilliant match of scholarship and investigative journalism".--

Alisa, one of my favorite all-time books right here:


John M. Barry

A great story and very well written!

And how it all started:

James Lewis

Product info:
Two centuries after the signing of the Louisiana Purchase, modern Americans consider the acquisition a foregone conclusion, inherent in our nation's "manifest destiny." At the time of the treaty, however, the idea of doubling the nation's size appeared to many as impossible, undesirable, and even unconstitutional. On the two-hundredth anniversary of its signing, a re-examination of one of the biggest land deals in American history is timely and revealing.

In 1803 President Thomas Jefferson charged James Monroe and Robert Livingston with the task of negotiating with the French to solve the longstanding problem of keeping an American port open at the mouth of the Mississippi River. Authorized to spend up to six million dollars to acquire as much as possible of New Orleans and Florida, Livingston and Monroe were instead stunned to be offered the entire Louisiana territory. Seizing the opportunity, the two men, as James Lewis writes in his lively analysis, "agreed to spend two-and-a-half times their budget to purchase a province that they had never been instructed to buy."

This volume offers a thoughtful understanding of a complex moment in American history, one which later became celebrated even as it raised fundamental questions about American polity and society--questions about governance, slavery, union, and the young nation's place in the world.

Louisiana is also the only state where the state law is based not on English Law but French.

Back in the good old days, one couldn't walk through the streets of New Orleans safely. This book shows how the Big Easy transformed into a tourist mecca.

Creating the Big Easy

by Anthony J. Stanonis (no photo)

Synopsis:

Between the World Wars, New Orleans transformed its image from that of a corrupt and sullied port of call into that of a national tourist destination. Anthony J. Stanonis tells how boosters and politicians reinvented the city to build a modern mass tourism industry and, along the way, fundamentally changed the city's cultural, economic, racial, and gender structure.Stanonis looks at the importance of urban development, historic preservation, taxation strategies, and convention marketing to New Orleans' makeover and chronicles the city's efforts to domesticate its jazz scene, "democratize" Mardi Gras, and stereotype local blacks into docile, servile roles. He also looks at depictions of the city in literature and film and gauges the impact on New Orleans of white middle-class America's growing prosperity, mobility, leisure time, and tolerance of women in public spaces once considered off-limits.

Visitors go to New Orleans with expectations rooted in the city's "past": to revel with Mardi Gras maskers, soak up the romance of the French Quarter, and indulge in rich cuisine and hot music. Such a past has a basis in history, says Stanonis, but it has been carefully excised from its gritty context and scrubbed clean for mass consumption.

Thank you Teri for all of the adds

Five Days at Memorial: Life and Death in a Storm-Ravaged Hospital

by Sheri Fink

Synopsis:

In the tradition of the best investigative journalism, physician and reporter Sheri Fink reconstructs 5 days at Memorial Medical Center and draws the reader into the lives of those who struggled mightily to survive and to maintain life amid chaos.

After Katrina struck and the floodwaters rose, the power failed, and the heat climbed, exhausted caregivers chose to designate certain patients last for rescue. Months later, several health professionals faced criminal allegations that they deliberately injected numerous patients with drugs to hasten their deaths.

Five Days at Memorial, the culmination of six years of reporting, unspools the mystery of what happened in those days, bringing the reader into a hospital fighting for its life and into a conversation about the most terrifying form of health care rationing.

In a voice at once involving and fair, masterful and intimate, Fink exposes the hidden dilemmas of end-of-life care and reveals just how ill-prepared we are in America for the impact of large-scale disasters—and how we can do better. A remarkable book, engrossing from start to finish, Five Days at Memorial radically transforms your understanding of human nature in crisis.

Thank you Alisa

Message 39 on the Louisiana Thread: (March 24, 2018)


Louisiana State Flower - The Magnolia

We are starting anew on this thread and I want to invite folks to please add their favorite books about the state of Louisiana or that took place in Louisiana.

Please feel free to add books, information about events that have occurred or will occur in the future, famous favorite sons and daughters of each state, places, attractions, and any historical events, etc. as well as the history of any aspect of the state's government, culture or anything else of distinction.

Also, please feel free to add any images of historical importance in each state.

Note: The History Book Club does not allow any spam or self promotion of any kind.

Please use the group's standard for citations so that the powerful goodreads software can capture your add. Bookcover, author's photo and author's link.

If you check on the white space to the right on any thread - you will notice that when the books are cited properly that goodreads keeps a list of all of them as well as a list of authors.

It also cross populates the site across all of the threads. Also, if you click on other topics - any member can also see on what other threads - either the book or the author has been discussed.

A very neat feature. Welcome to the conversation about the great state of Louisiana and let us know if you are from this great state.

We invite all members to post on any of the threads and we will help you with the citations. They do not have to be perfect - we are very patient and will work with you.

Here is a book about the state of Louisiana and one of its well known personages as an example - you can simply just add the book and author citation this way (we will help you):

by T. Harry Williams

or you can add any book like a moderator would do: - it is all up to you

Huey Long

by T. Harry Williams

Synopsis:

Who was Huey Long? He was an extraordinary figure in American political history – a great natural politician who looked, and often seemed to behave, like a caricature of the redneck Southern politico. Yet, at the time of his death, he had become a serious rival to Franklin Roosevelt for the presidency. In this biography, the first full-scale analysis of Long, this intriguing and incredible man stands wholly revealed and understood.

The eminent historian T. Harry Williams has created a work masterly in its scope and detail. This award-winning biography brings fresh life to the sensation-ridden years when Long became a figure of national importance. Huey Long was winner of the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award.

Instructions:

1. Mods add the book with the title in bold - if it is a non fiction book - you do not have to add anything underneath it because we are a history and non fiction group - but if it is a Novel or Fiction - you need to add that information for our members.
2. Skip a line and then add the citation - bookcover, author's photo when available, and then the author's link - skip another line
3. Synopsis: (in bold with a colon) and then skip a line
4. Simply add the publisher's write up - using the preview capability underneath the comment box - checking on the paragraphing - sometimes you will see that when you do a copy and paste that the breaks are missing so you might have to add them.

How Citations Should Look:

1. Bookcover, space, by, space, author's photo and author's link:

by T. Harry Williams

2. What if there is no author's photo?
Then = Bookcover, space, by, space, author's link, (no photo):

by Mike Tidwell (no photo

3. What if there is no book cover?
Then = (no image), space, by, space, author's photo, author's link:

(no image) Hold That Thought: A Year's Worth of Simple Abundance by Sarah Ban Breathnach

4. What if there is no bookcover and no author's photo?:

Then = (no image), book title link, space, by, space, author's link, (no photo):

(no image) Outrage at Sea: Naval Atrocities of the First World War by Tony Bridgland (no photo)

We hope you add to this wonderful state thread or any of the state threads. If you are from the state of Louisiana and would like to be the state host for the state of Louisiana on our site. Please let us know. Multiple folks can share that title and we will list your names on the thread as state hosts.

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

by Mike Tidwell (no photo)

Synopsis:

The Cajun coast of Louisiana is home to a way of life as unique, complex, and beautiful as the terrain itself. As award-winning travel writer Mike Tidwell journeys through the bayou, he introduces us to the food and the language, the shrimp fisherman, the Houma Indians, and the rich cultural history that makes it unlike any other place in the world. But seeing the skeletons of oak trees killed by the salinity of the groundwater, and whole cemeteries sinking into swampland and out of sight, Tidwell also explains why each introduction may be a farewell—as the storied Louisiana coast steadily erodes into the Gulf of Mexico.

Part travelogue, part environmental exposé, Bayou Farewell is the richly evocative chronicle of the author's travels through a world that is vanishing before our eyes.

A Confederacy of Dunces
FICTION

Perhaps the most well-known book about New Orleans, A Confederacy of Dunces was written by a New Orleans native but wasn’t published until over a decade after his suicide and later won a Pulitzer Prize for Fiction

by John Kennedy Toole

Synopsis:

"A green hunting cap squeezed the top of the fleshy balloon of a head. The green earflaps, full of large ears and uncut hair and the fine bristles that grew in the ears themselves, stuck out on either side like turn signals indicating two directions at once. Full, pursed lips protruded beneath the bushy black moustache and, at their corners, sank into little folds filled with disapproval and potato chip crumbs."

Meet Ignatius J. Reilly, the hero of John Kennedy Toole's tragicomic tale, A Confederacy of Dunces. This 30-year-old medievalist lives at home with his mother in New Orleans, pens his magnum opus on Big Chief writing pads he keeps hidden under his bed, and relays to anyone who will listen the traumatic experience he once had on a Greyhound Scenicruiser bound for Baton Rouge. ("Speeding along in that bus was like hurtling into the abyss.") But Ignatius's quiet life of tyrannizing his mother and writing his endless comparative history screeches to a halt when he is almost arrested by the overeager Patrolman Mancuso--who mistakes him for a vagrant--and then involved in a car accident with his tipsy mother behind the wheel. One thing leads to another, and before he knows it, Ignatius is out pounding the pavement in search of a job.

Over the next several hundred pages, our hero stumbles from one adventure to the next. His stint as a hotdog vendor is less than successful, and he soon turns his employers at the Levy Pants Company on their heads. Ignatius's path through the working world is populated by marvelous secondary characters: the stripper Darlene and her talented cockatoo; the septuagenarian secretary Miss Trixie, whose desperate attempts to retire are constantly, comically thwarted; gay blade Dorian Greene; sinister Miss Lee, proprietor of the Night of Joy nightclub; and Myrna Minkoff, the girl Ignatius loves to hate. The many subplots that weave through A Confederacy of Dunces are as complicated as anything you'll find in a Dickens novel, and just as beautifully tied together in the end. But it is Ignatius--selfish, domineering, and deluded, tragic and comic and larger than life--who carries the story. He is a modern-day Quixote beset by giants of the modern age. His fragility cracks the shell of comic bluster, revealing a deep streak of melancholy beneath the antic humor. John Kennedy Toole committed suicide in 1969 and never saw the publication of his novel. Ignatius Reilly is what he left behind, a fitting memorial to a talented and tormented life.

LITERARY AWARDS:
Pulitzer Prize for Fiction (1981), PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction Nominee (1981)