No Place, Louisiana PDF Download

Author: Martin Pousson
Publisher: Riverhead Books (Hardcover)
ISBN:
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 280

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Book Description
From a talented new Southern novelist comes an unforgettable family portrait of twisted love, shattered expectations, and undying hope.

Author: Adam Mandelman
Publisher: LSU Press
ISBN: 0807173193
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 343

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Book Description
In The Place with No Edge, Adam Mandelman follows three centuries of human efforts to inhabit and control the lower Mississippi River delta, the vast watery flatlands spreading across much of southern Louisiana. He finds that people’s use of technology to tame unruly nature in the region has produced interdependence with—rather than independence from—the environment. Created over millennia by deposits of silt and sand, the Mississippi River delta is one of the most dynamic landscapes in North America. From the eighteenth-century establishment of the first French fort below New Orleans to the creation of Louisiana’s Coastal Master Plan in the 2000s, people have attempted to harness and master this landscape through technology. Mandelman examines six specific interventions employed in the delta over time: levees, rice flumes, pullboats, geophysical surveys, dredgers, and petroleum cracking. He demonstrates that even as people seemed to gain control over the environment, they grew more deeply intertwined with—and vulnerable to—it. The greatest folly, Mandelman argues, is to believe that technology affords mastery. Environmental catastrophes of coastal land loss and petrochemical pollution may appear to be disconnected, but both emerged from the same fantasy of harnessing nature to technology. Similarly, the levee system’s failures and the subsequent deluge after Hurricane Katrina owe as much to centuries of human entanglement with the delta as to global warming’s rising seas and strengthening storms. The Place with No Edge advocates for a deeper understanding of humans’ relationship with nature. It provides compelling evidence that altering the environment—whether to make it habitable, profitable, or navigable —inevitably brings a response, sometimes with unanticipated consequences. Mandelman encourages a mindfulness of the ways that our inventions engage with nature and a willingness to intervene in responsible, respectful ways.

Author: Kate DiCamillo
Publisher: Candlewick Press
ISBN: 1536204773
Category : Juvenile Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 240

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Book Description
From two-time Newbery Medalist Kate DiCamillo comes a story of discovering who you are — and deciding who you want to be. When Louisiana Elefante’s granny wakes her up in the middle of the night to tell her that the day of reckoning has arrived and they have to leave home immediately, Louisiana isn’t overly worried. After all, Granny has many middle-of-the-night ideas. But this time, things are different. This time, Granny intends for them never to return. Separated from her best friends, Raymie and Beverly, Louisiana struggles to oppose the winds of fate (and Granny) and find a way home. But as Louisiana’s life becomes entwined with the lives of the people of a small Georgia town — including a surly motel owner, a walrus-like minister, and a mysterious boy with a crow on his shoulder — she starts to worry that she is destined only for good-byes. (Which could be due to the curse on Louisiana's and Granny’s heads. But that is a story for another time.) Called “one of DiCamillo’s most singular and arresting creations” by The New York Times Book Review, the heartbreakingly irresistible Louisiana Elefante was introduced to readers in Raymie Nightingale — and now, with humor and tenderness, Kate DiCamillo returns to tell her story.

Author: William A. Read
Publisher: University of Alabama Press
ISBN: 0817355057
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 149

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Book Description
His writings spanned five decades and have been instrumental across a wide range of academic disciplines. Most importantly, Read devoted a good portion of his research to the meaning of place names in the southeastern United States—especially as they related to Indian word adoption by Europeans. This volume includes his three Louisiana articles combined: Louisiana: Louisiana Place-Names of Indian Origin (1927), More Indian Place-Names in Louisiana (1928), and Indian Words (1931). Joining Alabama's reprint of Indian Places Names in Alabama and Florida Place Names of Indian Origin and Seminole Personal Names, this volume completes the republication of the southern place name writings of William A. Read.

Author: Patrick Earl Ryan
Publisher: University of Georgia Press
ISBN: 0820358088
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 168

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Book Description
If We Were Electric’s twelve stories celebrate New Orleans in all of its beautiful peculiarities: macabre and magical, muddy and exquisite, sensual and spiritual. The stunning debut collection finds its characters in moments of desire and despair, often stuck on the verge of a great metamorphosis, but burdened by some unreasonable love. These are stories about missed opportunities, about people on the outside who don’t fit in, about the consequences of not mustering enough courage to overcome the binds. In “Feux Follet,” an old man’s grief attracts supernatural lights in the dark Louisiana swamps. An exploding transformer’s raw, unnerving energy in the title story matches the strange, ferocious temper of an unlucky hustler. “Blackout” sets the profound numbness of a young man physically abused by his mentally unstable partner beside the meaningful beauty of an unexpected moment of joy with someone else. The teenage narrator in “Before Las Blancas” is so overwhelmed by his sexuality that he abandons everything and everyone he’s known to live in a happy illusion . . . in Mexico. And “Where It Takes Us” is a poignant, understated snapshot of a gay man who accompanies his straight, HIV-positive brother to the race track to bond again.

Author: Rheta Grimsley Johnson
Publisher: NewSouth Books
ISBN: 1603060596
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 226

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Book Description
For over a decade, syndicated columnist Rheta Grimsley Johnson has been spending several months a year in Southwest Louisiana, deep in the heart of Cajun Country. Unlike many other writers who have parachuted into the swampy paradise for a few days or weeks, Rheta fell in love with the place, bought a second home and set in planting doomed azaleas and deep roots. She has found an assortment of beautiful people in a homely little town called Henderson, right on the edge of the Atchafalaya Swamp. These days, much is labeled Cajun that is not, and the popularity of the unique culture’s food, songs and dance has been a mixed blessing. The revival of French Louisiana’s traditional music and cuisine often has been cheapened by counterfeits. Confused pilgrims sometimes look to New Orleans for a sampler platter of all things Cajun. Close, but no cigar. Poor Man’s Provence helps define what’s what through lively characters and stories. The book is both personal odyssey and good reporting, travelogue and memoir, funny and frank. This beguiling place is as exotic as it gets without a passport. The author shares what keeps her coming home to French Louisiana. And as NPR commentator Bailey White observes in her foreword, "Both Rheta's readers and the people she writes about will be comfortable, well fed, highly entertained, and happy they came to Poor Man's Provence."

Author: Carl A. Brasseaux
Publisher: Univ. Press of Mississippi
ISBN: 1496809513
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 233

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Book Description
Winner of the 2018 Louisiana Literary Award given by the Louisiana Library Association For centuries, outlanders have openly denigrated Louisiana's coastal wetlands residents and their stubborn refusal to abandon the region's fragile prairies tremblants despite repeated natural and, more recently, man-made disasters. Yet, the cumulative environmental knowledge these wetlands survivors have gained through painful experiences over the course of two centuries holds invaluable keys to the successful adaptation of modern coastal communities throughout the globe. As Hurricane Sandy recently demonstrated, coastal peoples everywhere face rising sea levels, disastrous coastal erosion, and, inevitably, difficult lifestyle choices. Along the Bayou State's coast the most insidious challenges are man-made. Since channelization of the Mississippi River in the wake of the 1927 flood, which diverted sediments and nutrients from the wetlands, coastal Louisiana has lost to erosion, subsidence, and rising sea levels a land mass roughly twice the size of Connecticut. State and national policymakers were unable to reverse this environmental catastrophe until Hurricane Katrina focused a harsh spotlight on the human consequences of eight decades of neglect. Yet, even today, the welfare of Louisiana's coastal plain residents remains, at best, an afterthought in state and national policy discussions. For coastal families, the Gulf water lapping at the doorstep makes this morass by no means a scholarly debate over abstract problems. Ain't There No More renders an easily read history filled with new insights and possibilities. Rare, previously unpublished images documenting a disappearing way of life accompany the narrative. The authors bring nearly a century of combined experience to distilling research and telling this story in a way invaluable to Louisianans, to policymakers, and to all those concerned with rising sea levels and seeking a long-term solution.

Author: Mike Tidwell
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 0307424928
Category : Travel
Languages : en
Pages : 368

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Book Description
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.

Author: John Dufresne
Publisher: National Geographic Books
ISBN: 0393330524
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
A favorite novel by “a generous and lyric storyteller” (San Francisco Chronicle) known for his tragicomic voice and unforgettable characters. Billy Wayne is the sole survivor of his oddball line of marginal folk. When he acquires a priestly vocation it seems likely he will be the last Fontana, until hearing a young woman’s confession propels him into an impulsive marriage.

Author: Jim Fraiser
Publisher: Univ. Press of Mississippi
ISBN: 9781578065240
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 230

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Book Description
The author, a native of New Orleans, displays his passion for the "French Quarter" of the city in 106 color photographs highlighting Old World architecture, style, and history that has made this section of the city famous throughout the world.