| The Year Before the Flood: A Story of New Orleans Contributor(s): Sublette, Ned (Author) |
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ISBN: 1556528248 ISBN-13: 9781556528248 Publisher: Lawrence Hill Books OUR PRICE: $25.16 Product Type: Hardcover - Other Formats Published: September 2009 Annotation: Spending 2004-2005 in New Orleans investigating the city's legendary past both in the archives and its living culture in the street, this account combines personal memoir, historical research, and on-the-ground reporting to trace a suspenseful arc through the last year New Orleans was whole. The perspectives of daily life and the passage of seasons in the antediluvian city are darkly comic, irreverent, passionate, and angry. Fully revealing the city's vicious heritage of racism and its murderous poverty, this heartbreaking narrative of joy, violence, and loss features a grand parade of unforgettable characters in the town that is both America's great music city and its homicide capital. |
| Additional Information |
| BISAC Categories: - History | United States - State & Local - South (al,ar,fl,ga,ky,la,ms,nc,sc,tn,va,wv) - History | United States - 21st Century - Music | History & Criticism - General |
| Dewey: 780.976 |
| LCCN: 2009011472 |
| Physical Information: 1.3" H x 6.1" W x 9" (1.70 lbs) 496 pages |
| Themes: - Chronological Period - 21st Century - Locality - New Orleans, Louisiana - Geographic Orientation - Louisiana - Cultural Region - Deep South - Cultural Region - Mid-South - Cultural Region - Southeast U.S. |
| Descriptions, Reviews, Etc. |
| Publisher Description: With a style the Los Angeles Times calls as "vivid and fast-moving as the music he loves," Ned Sublette's powerful new book drives the reader through the potholed, sinking streets of the United States's least-typical city. In this eagerly awaited follow-up to The World That Made New Orleans, Sublette's award-winning history of the Crescent City's colonial years, he traces an arc of his own experience, from the white supremacy of segregated 1950s Louisiana through the funky year of 2004-2005--the last year New Orleans was whole. By turns irreverent, joyous, darkly comic, passionate, and polemical, The Year Before the Flood juxtaposes the city's crowded calendar of parties, festivals, and parades with the murderousness of its poverty and its legacy of racism. Along the way, Sublette opens up windows of American history that illuminate the present: the trajectory of Mardi Gras from pre-Civil War days, the falsification of Southern history in movies, the city's importance to early rock and roll, the complicated story of its housing projects, the uniqueness of its hip-hop scene, and the celebratory magnificence of the participatory parades known as second lines. With a grand, unforgettable cast of musicians and barkeeps, scholars and thugs, vibrating with the sheer excitement of New Orleans, The Year Before the Flood is an affirmation of the power of the city's culture and a heartbreaking tale of loss that definitively establishes Ned Sublette as a great American writer for the 21st century. |