Reviews

NPR's Marketplace

Tess Vigeland, host of Marketplace on National Public Radio, found me hanging out at Finn McCool’s Irish Pub, where we conducted an on-the-spot interview about my book, getting it published and being a freelance writer in post-Katrina New Orleans.

Listen to the complete radio piece

Voices of New Orleans

McNulty has written a new chapter in the history of New Orleans and hopefully his careful study of the minutia of streets patrolled by the National Guard, parties by candlelight and bars open for business with doors that barely swing on the hinges will be the beginning of more explorations into not so much how cities nearly die, but more importantly, how they cling to life.

In many ways A Season of Night is a small story, but it is perfect and powerful just as it is. There was a man named Ian McNulty and he had a life until a storm came and a flood followed and everything changed forever. This book is about what happened next and serves as a record for all those who wonder just what has become of the city called New Orleans.

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Gambit Weekly

In contrast to the broad-strokes Katrina books that work to balance scores of individual accounts with social and political analysis, McNulty’s approach is defiantly, if quietly, personal. It’s this tight focus, combined with the author’s fine eye for detail and his honest, introspective narration, that gives the book its considerable power.
— Caroline Goyette

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WWL-TV Morning Show

Here’s a link to an interview on July 21, 2008 with Eric Paulsen of WWL-TV in New Orleans discussing my book.

The New London Day

At once evocative, bittersweet and funny, “A Season of Night” uses McNulty’s post-storm return to his severely damaged home in the Mid-City neighborhood to examine not just the scope of the devastation but also what tangible and ephemeral elements make New Orleans so essential, magical, and ultimately worth fighting for.
— Rick Koster

South County Independent

With intelligence, grace and wit, Ian McNulty has written a page-turning account of a city that refused to be beaten.
— Betty Cotter

The Providence Phoenix

Highly recommended…alternately moving (without being maudlin), raucous, and altogether winning.

The New Orleans Times Picayune

Joy — and sorrow — are offered up in equal measure in this memoir by McNulty…This book is his heartfelt tribute.
— Susan Larson

Gambit Weekly

At a time when national attention focused on the levees and political stage, McNulty was checking in on the more mundane landmarks of the city’s former daily grind. It’s the less than monumental moments that people took solace in during the worst of times that often best capture what it was like to live in a city that measured its future in mere days and weeks.

McNulty’s account is compelling because he both lived through and reported on the limbo-like transition from triage to healing. His fight to bring life back to his empty block and city is what gives the book a moving sense of struggle and determination. Anyone who also lived through it will appreciate his account of how much effort can go into even the most modest of small steps forward and how satisfying that could feel.
— Will Coviello, Gambit Weekly, July 8, 2008

The American Library Association (ALA) Booklist:

McNulty returned to his Mid-City home shortly after Katrina and recorded his observations. This is more than a simple “storm story,” and joins a tradition of evocative place biographies by recounting the discovery and purchase of his home three years earlier and also the histories for neighborhood destinations and traditions.

In this way, the author develops his memoir beyond the events of August 2005 into an examination of what makes a community significant.

In many ways, this post-storm memoir is certainly a study of urban destruction; although hopeful, McNulty does not shy away from the stark reality of life at the glacial pace of the reconstruction.

The nuts and bolts of months without electricity and hot water make it deeply personal, but the value is found in the answer to the question of why this particular city must be rebuilt.

It is, simply put, because so many people cannot imagine life anywhere else. They are the true City of New Orleans, and like McNulty, they require an infrastructure to give their hearts a home.
— Colleen Mondor, ALA Booklist

Advance Praise for "A Season of Night"

“Hold the phone. This isn’t just another Katrina book to add to the stacks. A Season of Night is more of a love story than the retelling of a beaten town. The story begins with infatuation that becomes deep love and ultimately turns to despair. McNulty is a gifted writer, never overwrought or dramatic as in many Katrina memoirs. He writes with maturity, insight, and in gorgeous color both of the devastation and of a city regaining its charm in ragged spurts. I read this wonderful book in one sitting, laughing at the funny gems and nodding along to its accuracy. For anyone who loves New Orleans: pour yourself a tall Abita—maybe several—and do the same.”
— Ace Atkins, author of White Shadow and Wicked City

Though it reads like post-apocalyptic fiction—a city cast in pitch-black darkness every night, a man on a bicycle chased by a pack of starving dogs turned feral, a party in an unheated house lit only by candles at which guests smash a car parked at the curb with debris from rotting houses—Ian McNulty’s “A Season of Night: New Orleans Life after Katrina” is actually a deeply moving elegy to a house, a neighborhood, and a city in ruins after the collapse of its levees.
—John Biguenet, author of Oyster and Rising Water