Published by University of California Press, 2013, 166 pages

This is a look at New Orleans in all its complexities and contradictions, with essays written by musicians, activists, environmentalists, Native Americans, and Arabs.

Each essay looks at a particular aspect: the history of its founding, its movement of peoples, the city’s relationship with water, oil, trade, and music, and how each of these shaped modern-day New Orleans. And each essay is accompanied by a beautifully drawn map.

“Maps typically show what is visible and fixed in place, but cities are made as much of invisible and transient forces, of the departed and present people who shape its culture and politics, of weather and atmosphere, of joys and sorrows, holidays and slants of light. This atlas tries to map some of those invisible forces….”

And this it does, building a multidimensional view that links history and the contemporary. Take, for example, the area around Central Business District. A site of slave pens in the days of slavery, but also where civil rights activist Paul Trevigne was married in the 1800s. Today it’s the site of the oldest bakery in New Orleans (started in 1904), a shrimp restaurant that opened in 1913, a mosque, the start of the Chewbacchus Crewe’s carnival parade, and a venue with a rich musical past and a thriving present (including a New Orleans genre, Bounce). The Superdome—the refuge of hundreds of people during Hurricane Katrina—is in the area. The Mixology Festival takes place here, serving some 194,000 drinks in five days. 

The essay topics don’t follow conventional demarcations. Some juxtapose things you wouldn’t think go together (but they do). Their titles are eloquent: “Hot and Steamy: Selling Seafood, Selling Sex”; “Lead and Lies: Mouths Full of Poison”; and “Repercussions: Rhythms and Resistance across the Atlantic”. This is truly a vivid, warts-and-all biography of New Orleans, written by people who love the city. By the end, I could smell the city and hear it—the music, the parades, and the people on the street. Rebecca Solnit produced similar books on San Francisco and New York, and I hope there will be others.

This review first appeared on Women on the Road.