Dr. Mary's Monkey: How the Unsolved Murder of a Doctor, a Secret Laboratory in New Orleans and Cancer-Causing Monkey Viruses are Linked to Lee Harvey Oswald, ... Assassination and Emerging Global Epidemics
by Edward T. Haslam
from Trine Day
1 Dead in Attic: After Katrina
by Chris Rose
from Simon & Schuster
Dead in Attic is a collection of stories by Times-Picayune columnist Chris Rose, recounting the first harrowing year and a half of life in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina. Celebrated as a local treasure and heaped with national praise, Rose provides a rollercoaster ride of observation, commentary, emotion, tragedy, and even humor -- in a way that only he could find in a devastated wasteland.
They are stories of the dead and the living, stories of survivors and believers, stories of hope and despair. And stories about refrigerators.
Dead in Attic freeze-frames New Orleans, caught between an old era and a new, during its most desperate time, as it struggles out of the floodwaters and wills itself back to life.
The Day Freedom Died: The Colfax Massacre, the Supreme Court, and the Betrayal of Reconstruction
by Charles Lane
from Henry Holt and Co.
Seeking justice for the slain, one brave U.S. attorney, James Beckwith, risked his life and career to investigate and punish the perpetrators—but they all went free. What followed was a series of courtroom dramas that culminated at the Supreme Court, where the justices’ verdict compromised the victories of the Civil War and left Southern blacks at the mercy of violent whites for generations. The Day Freedom Died is an electrifying piece of historical detective work that captures a gallery of characters from presidents to townspeople, and re-creates the bloody days of Reconstruction, when the often brutal struggle for equality moved from the battlefield into communities across the nation.
Pawprints of Katrina: Pets Saved and Lessons Learned
by Cathy Scott
from Howell Book House
Pawprints of Katrina includes nearly 200 heroic rescues, heartwarming reunions, and stories of selfless efforts of strangers brought together by a disaster to save animals at the Best Friends Animal Society triage center because their owners were unable to. The stories and photos included in this book will bring the experience of pet victims to life for the reader, from the first moments when the animals are rescued, to when they’re examined, treated, and cared for by volunteers, until the day they are reunited with their families or placed in new homes. The reader will also meet the volunteers who made the rescue efforts possible. Author Cathy Scott worked beside them, not only writing about the animals, but also helping to rescue and reunite them.
While in the Gulf on assignment for Best Friends magazine, she visited temporary shelters, including Mutt Shack across from Lake Pontchartrain; Winn-Dixie in Gentilly; Animal Rescue New Orleans near Carrollton; the Humane Society of Louisiana, which relocated from New Orleans to Tylertown next door to Best Friends’ relief center; and the Humane Society of South Mississippi in Gulfport. The resulting stories are straight from the rubble-strewn streets. She provides a rare, historic look behind the scenes of the massive animal rescue efforts. Scott’s unique approach comes from being both on the ground and in boats, witnessing firsthand the rescues and the resulting reunions between human refugees and their pets. She presents not only the most dramatic and challenging cases, but also describes many other tales of large groups of pets left to fend for themselves, then plucked to safety.
Scott’s narrative yet straightforward style is laced with sensitivity and inspiration as she traces the animals’ steps. From her front-row seat, she pieces together stories using Best Friends’ expansive database, paperwork from the field, interviews with Louisiana officials, law enforcement officers and military personnel, rescue groups, individual rescuers, veterinarians, and volunteers from all walks of life, as well as her personal knowledge as a first responder and rescuer in the field.
The World That Made New Orleans: From Spanish Silver to Congo Square
by Ned Sublette
from Lawrence Hill Books
New Orleans is the most elusive of American cities. The product of the centuries-long struggle among three mighty empires--France, Spain, and England--and among their respective American colonies and enslaved African peoples, it has always seemed like a foreign port to most Americans, baffled as they are by its complex cultural inheritance.
The World That Made New Orleans offers a new perspective on this insufficiently understood city by telling the remarkable story of New Orleans’s first century--a tale of imperial war, religious conflict, the search for treasure, the spread of slavery, the Cuban connection, the cruel aristocracy of sugar, and the very different revolutions that created the United States and Haiti. It demonstrates that New Orleans already had its own distinct personality at the time of Louisiana’s statehood in 1812. By then, important roots of American music were firmly planted in its urban swamp--especially in the dances at Congo Square, where enslaved Africans and African Americans appeared en masse on Sundays to, as an 1819 visitor to the city put it, “rock the city.”
This book is a logical continuation of Ned Sublette’s previous volume, Cuba and Its Music: From the First Drums to the Mambo, which was highly praised for its synthesis of musical, cultural, and political history. Just as that book has become a standard resource on Cuba, so too will The World That Made New Orleans long remain essential for understanding the beautiful and tragic story of this most American of cities.
McIlhenny's Gold: How a Louisiana Family Built the Tabasco Empire
by Jeffrey Rothfeder
from Collins Business
The story of the powerful McIlhennys of Louisiana, who turned hot peppers into a Tabasco fortune
After the Civil War ended, Edmund McIlhenny, an ambitious and tenacious Louisiana businessman, found himself with few prospects. The South's economy in ruins and his millions of dollars in Confederacy currency worthless, he had no choice but to return with his wife, Mary, to her family home in Avery Island, a former sugar plantation destroyed by Union soldiers.
To McIlhenny's surprise, the hot peppers he had planted before being forced off the island had flourished. Desperate to start a new business, he chopped up the peppers, combined them with salt and vinegar, and produced the first batch of hot pepper sauce. Or so the story goes. He called the sauce Tabasco.
In this fascinating history, Jeffrey Rothfeder tells how, from a simple idea—the outgrowth of a handful of peppers planted on an isolated island on the Gulf of Mexico—a secretive family business emerged that would produce one of the best-known products in the world. In short order, McIlhenny's descendants would turn Tabasco into a gold mine and an icon of pop culture, making it as recognizable as far bigger brands such as Coca-Cola and Kleenex.
To this day, the McIlhenny Co., still run by a family of matchless characters who believe in a rigid code of family loyalty, clings to tradition and the old ways of doing business. Yet by fiercely protecting its beloved brand and refusing to sell out to big food conglomerates, this family business has run circles around its competitors, churning out annual revenues that have surpassed everyone's expectations.
A delectable and satisfying read for both Tabasco fans and business buffs, McIlhenny's Gold is the untold story of the continuing success of an eccentric, private company; a lively history of one of the most popular consumer products of all times; and an exploration of our desire to test the limits of human tolerance for fiery foods.
The Great Deluge: Hurricane Katrina, New Orleans, and the Mississippi Gulf Coast
by Douglas Brinkley
from Harper Perennial
Bestselling historian Douglas Brinkley, a professor at Tulane University, lived through the destruction of Hurricane Katrina with his fellow New Orleans residents, and now in The Great Deluge he has written one of the first complete accounts of that harrowing week, which sorts out the bewildering events of the storm and its aftermath, telling the stories of unsung heroes and incompetent officials alike. Get a sample of his story--and clarify your own memories--by looking through the detailed timeline he has put together of the preparation, the hurricane, and the response to one of the worst disasters in American history.
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In the span of five violent hours on August 29, 2005, Hurricane Katrina destroyed major Gulf Coast cities and flattened 150 miles of coastline. But it was only the first stage of a shocking triple tragedy. On the heels of one of the three strongest hurricanes ever to make landfall in the United States came the storm-surge flooding, which submerged a half-million homes—followed by the human tragedy of government mismanagement, which proved as cruel as the natural disaster itself.
In The Great Deluge, bestselling author Douglas Brinkley finds the true heroes of this unparalleled catastrophe, and lets the survivors tell their own stories, masterly allowing them to record the nightmare that was Katrina.
The French Quarter: An Informal History of the New Orleans Underworld
by Herbert Asbury
from Basic Books
Uglesich's Restaurant Cookbook
by John Uglesich
from Pelican Publishing Company
First opened for business in 1920, Uglesich's Restaurant has become one of the premier destination restaurants for locals and tourists alike. Over the years, the restaurant has gone from its humble beginnings, serving po' boys, fried seafood, and breakfast, to offer gourmet-quality New Orleans food, attracting culinary critics from around the world.
For many years, patrons have clamored to take home a piece of the restaurant. "Uglesich's Restaurant Cookbook" gives all those who have fond memories of the restaurant a taste of New Orleans at its freshest. This highly anticipated cookbook, written by the owners' son, contains seventy-five old, current, and new restaurant recipes along with a complete history of the establishment and the Uglesich family.
Why New Orleans Matters
by Tom Piazza
from Harper
Every place has its history. But what is it about New Orleans that makes it more than just the sum of the events that have happened there? What is it about the spirit of the people who live there that could produce a music, a cuisine, an architecture, a total environment, the mere mention of which can bring a smile to the face of someone who has never even set foot there?
What is the meaning of a place like that, and what is lost if it is lost?
The winds of Hurricane Katrina, and the national disaster that followed, brought with them a moment of shared cultural awareness: Thousands were killed and many more displaced; promises were made, forgotten, and renewed; the city of New Orleans was engulfed by floodwaters of biblical proportions—all in a wrenching drama that captured international attention. Yet the passing of that moment has left too many questions.
What will become of New Orleans in the months and years to come? What of its people, who fled the city on a rising tide of panic, trading all they knew and loved for a dim hope of shelter and rest? And, ultimately, what do those people and their city mean to America and the world?
In Why New Orleans Matters, award-winning author and New Orleans resident Tom Piazza illuminates the storied culture and uncertain future of this great and most neglected of American cities. With wisdom and affection, he explores the hidden contours of familiar traditions like Mardi Gras and Jazz Fest, and evokes the sensory rapture of the city that gave us jazz music and Creole cooking. He writes, too, of the city's deep undercurrents of corruption, racism, and injustice, and of how its people endure and transcend those conditions. And, perhaps most important, he asks us all to consider the spirit of this place and all the things it has shared with the world—grace and beauty, resilience and soul. "That spirit is in terrible jeopardy right now," he writes. "If it dies, something precious and profound will go out of the world forever."
Why New Orleans Matters is a gift from one of our most talented writers to the beloved and important city he calls home—and to a nation to whom that city's survival has been entrusted.
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