It Happened in New Orleans

Bonnye E. Stuart
The Globe Pequot Press (2007)
ISBN 0762739053
Reviewed by Olivera Baumgartner-Jackson for Reader Views (3/07)

Bonnye E. Stuart’s “It Happened in New Orleans” is subtitled “From famous altercations under the Deulling (sic!) Oaks to the devastation of Hurricane Katrina, thirty episodes that shaped the history of the Big Easy.” The typo on the cover should have been a tip-off, but I still delved in. Well, not just the typo, but the choice of the two events serving as ‘bookends’ to the history of New Orleans. In hindsight, I should have started with the last chapter and I would have saved myself a couple of hours.

While the book is written in a pleasant, easy to read style, I often spotted mistakes or things that left me vaguely uneasy. I’ve done a fair amount of research on New Orleans history both for professional and personal reasons and quite some of the stories sounded either incomplete or vaguely wrong. There were several kinds of things that made me feel troubled. One of them was blatant disregard for our historic and cultural heritage, as it is displayed in the (very lightweight!) chapter on Marie Laveau. At the very end of it the author namely writes, “She (Marie) is buried in St. Louis Cemetery No. 1 in the Glapion family vault. Many say that if you draw an X on the side of her tomb, your wish will be granted.” While I am not going to enter into the debate on where Marie is buried – many scholars have been arguing about that so far, I firmly draw the line at marking her tomb. Such desecration destroys the tomb and is widely frowned upon by the people who take care of our cemeteries and our heritage.

Then there were such cute bloopers as the one in the chapter on Edgar Degas, the famous French painter. “The Degas family home at 2306 Esplanade Avenue sat on the edge of the busy French Quarter.” Well, the house in question was truly a Musson house, built in 1881 for Degas’ cousin Estelle Musson – and there are two, not one of them. If anybody, including Ms. Stuart, wants to read more about it, Christopher Benfey wrote an excellent book on Degas (Degas in New Orleans, University of California Press, 1997). To make matters even better, 2306 Esplanade is hardly on the edge of the French Quarter. It is a good, long walk – some 14 very, very long blocks.

I could go on like this, but I will give you just one last example. Before I do, let me state that nowhere in the book I got the impression that the author was writing fiction. Therefore I expected serious research (and probably some serious written sources, not mainly Internet articles as well as newspaper and magazine ones, as is evident from the References section at the end of the book). The last chapter deals with Hurricane Katrina. I am not going to double check all of the data and figures in it, although at a glance quite some of them seem off. But this really topped it all for me, “When the weather finally cleared, New Orleans was a devastated ghost town. Neighborhoods flooded by contaminated water stood empty. Businesses were closed. Trade and tourism were at a standstill. The Superdome sat bruised and battered. The wrought-iron balconies of the French Quarter lay twisted and discarded.” There was hardly any damage in the French Quarter. It did not flood. Some of the bars on Bourbon never closed. And none of the balconies were torn off, let alone discarded. I should know. I was there.

Such inaccuracies and unwanted sensationalism are not going to help New Orleans and although I appreciate Ms. Stuart’s effort to write what she probably intended as a homage to a city she obviously loves, I cannot recommend her book as it is. If she is willing to put more time and research in it, I’ll gladly read “It Happened in New Orleans” again and revise my opinion. But for the time being, there are better and more accurate books out there than this rehash of a hodge-podge of events.

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