Excerpts
Chapter 1: Rowed Home
I fled my New Orleans home in a car speeding down the old River Road the day before Hurricane Katrina struck. I crept back to it two weeks later in a boat, drifting slowly through the ruined urban wilderness of brown floodwater and battered houses that had been my neighborhood.
Chapter 3: Heartbreak Motel
I was compelled by my own personal desire to make it real, to live the experience of my city. I needed to immerse myself in home and be part of it, even in its pain and degradation.
Chapter 6: Civilization, Distilled and Deglazed
The city's eating and drinking places were the fires around which we circled for reminders of the city's life and culture before the storm, for company and sometimes literally for warmth.
Chapter 7: Ground Scores
The best thing I ever took from this street harvest, though, was a little dog who scared me so bad the first time I saw her I thought we would have to fight.
Chapter 9: Tropical Lows
Before long, I came to regard the dark not just as a phase of the day but as its own physical presence. I felt invisible in it and swallowed up by it.
Chapter 11: Mardi Gras
Mardi Gras, at its best, can make you believe in New Orleans, in its magic and its fun and its romance. In that winter after Katrina, at the tail end of that dark and terrible season of night, New Orleans needed magic, fun and romance. It needed believers and it needed Mardi Gras.
