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Unfathomable City: A New Orleans Atlas (2013)

par Rebecca Solnit (Directeur de publication), Rebecca Snedeker (Directeur de publication)

Autres auteurs: Billy Sothern (Contributeur)

Séries: Rebecca Solnit's City Atlases (2)

MembresCritiquesPopularitéÉvaluation moyenneMentions
1925140,506 (4.38)4
"Like the bestselling Infinite City: A San Francisco Atlas, this book is a brilliant reinvention of the traditional atlas, one that provides a vivid, complex look at the multi-faceted nature of New Orleans, a city replete with contradictions. More than twenty essays assemble a chorus of vibrant voices, including geographers, scholars of sugar and bananas, the city's remarkable musicians, prison activists, environmentalists, Arab and Native voices, and local experts, as well as the coauthors' compelling contributions. Featuring 22 full-color two-page-spread maps, Unfathomable City plumbs the depths of this major tourist destination, pivotal scene of American history and culture and, most recently, site of monumental disasters such as Hurricane Katrina and the BP oil spill. The innovative maps' precision and specificity shift our notions of the Mississippi, the Caribbean, Mardi Gras, jazz, soils and trees, generational roots, and many other subjects, and expand our ideas of how any city is imagined and experienced. Together with the inspired texts, they show New Orleans as both an imperiled city-by erosion, crime, corruption, and sea level rise-and an ageless city that lives in music as a form of cultural resistance. Compact, lively, and completely original, Unfathomable City takes readers on a tour that will forever change the way they think about place."--… (plus d'informations)
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5 sur 5
Such a thoughtful, beautiful way to look at a city, any city; and with that, a remarkable testament to a particular city that so many think they've got pinned down. ( )
  Kiramke | Jun 27, 2023 |
This book is another wy of looking at New Orleans, particular post-Katrina, with the use of very inventive maps. The well-known author, Rebecca Solnit ("Walking") takes on the task with a host of special contributors. New Orleans is an old city with distinctive culture, and very defined by the fact that much of it is below sea level. So, how does it survive in its particular way? So swamped cemeteries, and levees, and the uses of sugar, and sex, and parades, and hip-hop, and St. Claude Avenue, and juju are variously written about. Sometimes, a little uneven, but worth the effort. ( )
  vpfluke | Jul 16, 2016 |
A beautiful tribute to the complicated, wonderful city of New Orleans and especially its people. This book is an atlas, but nothing like you used to find (or maybe still do?) in a gas station convenience store. Within, there are 20 beautiful and heartfelt essays on topics that are relevant to the city's past, present, and future. Each essay is accompanied by an artistic and cartographically accurate map of the city, showing the impact of that particular topic on New Orleans.

One essay, called "Of Levees and Prisons" reflects on the ideas of freedom and containment in New Orleans and Louisiana as a whole. It discusses Louisiana's slavery and segregation, and how they are the state with the largest percentage of its population incarcerated. They are containing many of their own. In relation, through the building of levees and spillways, the state seeks to contain the Mississippi River within rigid borders. The essay suggests that there has to be a better way to function than this kind of containment, when has failed repeatedly. The accompanying map shows the location of the many prisons, customs offices, police stations, and levees throughout New Orleans and the surrounding area. It contrasts these vessels of containment with "flows of freedom" that seek to educate, empower, and assist the population of the area. These include ministry organizations, community aid groups, charities, and the Southern Poverty Law Office.

This book serves not only to tell where you are, but to tell you who is there with you. It gives you perspective on the Crescent City and its many inhabitants...far more deeply than you could ever get as a tourist. You get context, and may develop an appreciation for this area that the author describes as, "unfathomable, endless, protean, immortal, and fragile". I know I have. ( )
  BooksForYears | Mar 31, 2016 |
This is a very biased history of New Orleans, not a map-based almanac, as it's apparently marketed. I don't even have to look up the political leanings of the book's editors, both named Rebecca, to determine they're Alinskyite cultural marxist leftists. An unintentionally comical passage can be seen on page 60: "Black men who reside in New Orleans have the highest rate of imprisonment, with 1 in 14 locked up. This reality has been justified as a need to crack down on violent crime and protect the public from menacing criminals lurking throughout the city. Despite such narratives, crime rates have been dropping steadily since the 1980s in Louisiana, and across the nation. However, arrest rates, and thus incarceration rates, have gone up."

Where to even begin with this? First off, 1991-94 had NOLA's highest homicide totals. Black men commit about 95% of NOLA's homicides every year. Yes, they "lurk throughout the city." Most of their victims are black. Locking up black criminals prevents innocent black residents from being killed. These authors are not happy with that. Look at the last two sentences in that passage in particular. These authors don't see the correlation between locking up criminals and a drop in the crime rate. Imagine a book that said "The hunger rate has been dropping in ___ for several years / decades. Despite that, people keep baking bread and distributing it to the poor." Just reverse those two sentences and you'll realize WHY the hunger rate has dropped. Or how about: "Venomous snake bites have been declining for decades. Despite this, animal control authorities still insist on banning venomous snakes from being owned as pets." Getting back to crime in New Orleans: Check out nola.com on any day of the week to see depraved criminal acts that would make Hollywood screenwriters blush. This book is essentially one long lecture about how evil white people are, with the occasional map or engineering factoid thrown in.

Chapter 12, titled "The Mississippi Is (Not) The Nile," asserts that much of NOLA's culture is stolen from Arabic lands, while New Orleanians in general "demoniz[e] the actual representatives of those cultures here." It makes no mention of the fact that the Muslim slave trade (Muslims enslaving Africans) has been going on for 1400 years, and predates U.S. slavery by about a thousand years, and involved tens of millions more slaves than our system did. (And they enslaved between 1-3 million white Europeans.) It does include this New Age gobbledygook, by Khaled Hegazzi and Andy Young: "I am the magical. I am the mystical. I am the Egyptian. Black people see me as a man who will come (in the future) from an ancient time to gather black people around the world, unify them," etc. LOL... Yes, your people did "gather black people" and sell them to other parts of the world. You invented the international slave trade, whereas white people of European descent participated in slavery for a relatively short amount of time (about 240 years), after which point they have done their best to end the international slave trade for about the past 150 years. However, most black people today think the reverse is true, hence why so many of them embrace Islam, the religion that made their lives miserable.

Chapter 18 of this book, "Snakes And Ladders," written entirely by Rebecca Solnit, is borderline treasonous. And it fails to mention that black and white people were killed by Katrina in similar amounts, despite the fact that NOLA was only about 28% white at the time the hurricane hit. I know people who witnessed incredibly chilling things during the weeks after Katrina, such as AK-47-toting looters paddling around in canoes in Old Metry, carrying TV sets as bounty. Books like this one would have you believe no such things happened, and that the word "looter" itself is a racist construct, and that NOPD were the true "looters."

On pg. 149, in a map/chapter titled "Lead And Lies," a factoid states "Undocumented workers rebuilding the devastated city face widespread wage theft from employers." Yes, illegal immigrants were allowed to stay and work in the city (how racist of the white people here not to deport them, right?), and a small percentage of them were cheated out of money by bad contractors. Bad contractors also do this to white, black, Asian, etc. people every day of the week in this country and every other one. The chapter doesn't mention that much of the work done by these unskilled workers was shoddy and later had to be torn out and redone, at huge cost to homeowners / landlords. And of course there's the Chinese drywall scandal, in which a lot of the drywall used to rebuild the city spawned toxic mold. It was of course cheap drywall made in China. The book doesn't mention that either. Nor does it mention that Friday afternoons were when NOLA criminals (almost entirely black ones, but you can't point that out or you're a racist) would target immigrants and rob them of the money (usually cash) that they had just been paid.

Despite my criticisms of this book, it does have a good chapter by Lolis Eric Elie. (Full disclosure: I lived with one of his relatives for a while after Katrina, when the flooding forced me to move to a town outside of New Orleans.) Almost anything he writes is well-informed and positive in nature. And the book's fine print sometimes accurately places blame on NOLA's almost entirely black, Democrat elected leadership, e.g. William Jefferson and Ray Nagin, but it essentially brushes them under the carpet. Why is every "ghetto"-type city in America run by Democrats of color? :Crickets chirping: I don't remember if the book mentions the murder of leftist NOLA filmmaker Helen Hill, who was murdered in her own home in a very, er, diverse part of the city in 2007.

Chapter 13 appeals to me because I'm in horticulture. It's entirely about a species of tree called the live oak, which gives the city / region much of its character, as well as how that tree helps shape the city's Mardi Gras parades. I personally have grown and given away dozens of 'em.

Overall, this book should be read by everyone. Why on earth would I say that? Because being able to decipher leftist bias is a skill everyone in any country on earth, especially the "civilized" Western ones, needs to acquire. In this book the bias is quite blatant, so it doesn't exactly take a rocket scientist to spot it, but still... What I'm saying is, the book contains what could be termed lies of omission, rather than factual lies. (I'm sure it contains plenty of factual errors as well, but my main problem is with its overall tone and tenor.) For example, the U.S. Department Of Justice's interracial crime stats reveal that in America, blacks commit aggravated assault (generally defined as assault with a weapon) on whites at approximately 200 times the rate that whites commit it on blacks. Read that again until it registers in your mind. That's a fact that informs my view of books like this one, and of the leftist TV network MSNBC, and so forth. The truth shall set you free, as the saying goes. (My learning of that assault stat last year, in the wake of #Ferguson and #BlackLivesMatter, has dramatically shaped my view of things like "racism," "white flight," "cultural appropriation," "gentrification," "marginalization," etc., and made me essentially change my political affiliation from being a lifelong leftist Independent to a right-leaning Libertarian.) This book paints a picture of New Orleans as a place where white people do everything in their power to "marginalize" people of color, whereas the truth of the matter is that black people are treated with utmost respect and dare I say adulation here. The evil white residents vote for black politicians, wear black athletes' jerseys, turn out in droves for black musicians' performances, and so forth, all despite the stunning aggravated assault statistic I cited above. Doesn't sound like a very racist place to me. But maybe I'm just a hopelessly clueless white guy whose very existence marginalizes everyone else. I'll try to go back to following the #StayInYourLane protocol as soon as this review is over, I promise...

Update: After writing this review, I looked up the Rebeccas. Both of them are white, if it matters. Soling says she was raised in a house "where everything feminine and female and my gender was hated." She described her book A Paradise Built In Hell thusly: "What happens in disasters demonstrates everything an anarchist ever wanted to believe about the triumph of civil society and the failure of institutional authority." So yup, she's a radical feminist, socialist, and apparently an anarchist or anarchist sympathizer. Did I mention she's a lifelong California resident, and specifically a San Francisco resident, not a New Orleanian? (I lived in San Fran for 6 years in the '80s, and NOLA for 17 years, from '88 up until Katrina.) She is credited with popularizing the concept of "mansplaining." I'm not sure why she thought she could "Californiasplain" a complex city like New Orleans without having lived in it. Snedeker is a native New Orleanian and seems to be much more of a grounded human. She recently tweeted out her support for the condescending film Dear White People, a play called "Here Is Where You Turn Back,” a video called "Deborah Cotton: Violence In New Orleans," and other such creations that blame one group of people, but she seems to have a more sobering view of the city. Listen to a brief NPR interview with Snedeker about Unfathomable City at http://wwno.org/post/reading-life-atlas-birds-and-bird ( )
  YESterNOw | May 25, 2015 |
First off, I just want to say how much I love the smell of this book (and its predecessor, [Infinite City]). I'm a fan of book and bookstore scents - I even have a perfume called Paperback - so when a book smells amazing, I can't help myself (and just to clarify, the book smells like freshly-printed ink and paper draawings and crisp wood).

I picked up this atlas after reading (and loving) Solnit's San Francisco atlas, and I was ecstatic when I learned she recently published a similar atlas on New Orleans (with the help of Snedeker, a native New Orleansian). The maps and essays in this book were just as beautiful, vibrant, thought-provoking, moving, and eye-opening as in its predecessor; however, I thought that some of the topics were kind of repetitive, and the same issues were being brought up over and over (such as Katrina, racism, classism, and the city's history with slavery), which of course makes absolute sense, since this atlas serves as a historical and cultural guide to the city, and you can't discuss New Orleans without discussing those topics. But I guess what I felt was that this book was more depressing than the San Francisco atlas. I wish there were a few more essays/maps about the unique and colorful people, events, and places in New Orleans, rather than the tragedies and shortcomings of its history and people.

Despite my complaint, this book made me more eager than ever to go back to New Orleans, and perhaps even live there for a while. I want to experience all that the city has to offer (and the food! My God, the food!), and I feel all the more informed about the city and its people than before. ( )
1 voter kaylaraeintheway | Aug 18, 2014 |
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Solnit, RebeccaDirecteur de publicationauteur principaltoutes les éditionsconfirmé
Snedeker, RebeccaDirecteur de publicationauteur principaltoutes les éditionsconfirmé
Sothern, BillyContributeurauteur secondairetoutes les éditionsconfirmé
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"Like the bestselling Infinite City: A San Francisco Atlas, this book is a brilliant reinvention of the traditional atlas, one that provides a vivid, complex look at the multi-faceted nature of New Orleans, a city replete with contradictions. More than twenty essays assemble a chorus of vibrant voices, including geographers, scholars of sugar and bananas, the city's remarkable musicians, prison activists, environmentalists, Arab and Native voices, and local experts, as well as the coauthors' compelling contributions. Featuring 22 full-color two-page-spread maps, Unfathomable City plumbs the depths of this major tourist destination, pivotal scene of American history and culture and, most recently, site of monumental disasters such as Hurricane Katrina and the BP oil spill. The innovative maps' precision and specificity shift our notions of the Mississippi, the Caribbean, Mardi Gras, jazz, soils and trees, generational roots, and many other subjects, and expand our ideas of how any city is imagined and experienced. Together with the inspired texts, they show New Orleans as both an imperiled city-by erosion, crime, corruption, and sea level rise-and an ageless city that lives in music as a form of cultural resistance. Compact, lively, and completely original, Unfathomable City takes readers on a tour that will forever change the way they think about place."--

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