This means we now have to add Tina Turner to the Armstrong Park sculpture garden

Ed Blakely wrote a book about us.

In telling his own version, Blakely at times sounds like a dilettante who never really soaked up the city's essence. The book's cover features a picture of storm damage in Slidell, not New Orleans, according to the photographer who shot it. And when Blakely tries to make a case for New Orleans' cultural relevance on the book's very first page, three of the five musicians he names as natives -- Scott Joplin, Josephine Baker and Tina Turner -- have nothing to do with the city.

I have not yet gotten my grubby little hands on this long-awaited chronicle of greatness but I plan to rectify that oversight in short order. This is the book we've been waiting for. This is the jewel of our Excellence in Recovery Bookshelf which holds such mighty tomes as Ray Nagin's Katrina's Secrets (Vol. 1), Veronica White's How to Maximize FEMA Funding Michael Brown's Deadly Indifference and hopefully someday that book we all need to get to work on convincing Greg Meffert's wife to self publish.

All of these celebrated authors are renowned for their creative story telling as well as their dynamic personalities and they all have their strengths. White was the fashionable one, Nagin was the funny one, Brown was the enigmatic unknowable one, but Blakely... he was the IT girl of the group, so to speak. The guy could do it all. Or rather, he never failed to tell us about the many things he could do.. as opposed to the things he actually accomplished during his time in New Orleans... anyway.

I can't wait to get a look at this book for myself and I'm sure neither can you. In the meantime, just to tide you over, maybe let's take a look back at the Blakely retrospective we put together in 2008 when we thought his tenure was nearing an end. As it turned out he stayed on another full year before amazing the lot of us by flying away in a balloon powered by his own hot air.