Book Review: Including very litte discussion of the actual book

Among the many transplants to New Orleans I have encountered in my time there is a common emotional attatchment to the city most of them describe as "love/hate". Generally those who have adopted and come to love our culture have done so in stages. It begins as a primitivist fascination. The longer one stays here the more one learns to appreciate the intricacies. Things that seem simple or foolish or unnecessary begin to take on deeper meaning. People and events are not always what they seem on the surface. New Orleans teaches one not to be surprised by contraditions. Eventually, if the non-native is paying attention, something gets internalized. But transplants, unlike natives, retain some sense that life here is an exception to a colder more rational reality that exists in Ohio or Wisconsin or Massachussetts (they're almost always from the North) or wherever these people came from. And that's where the "hate" side comes in. They don't really hate it here, they just cling to the notion that things aren't done in a way they would consider proper. So they like to complain... but generally they don't really want to leave.

Unlike natives, however, transplants can leave. They can go back to Kansas (so to speak) should they choose where life is less interesting but (to them at least) more real. If evacuation taught me anything it is that natives cannot leave. Once removed from the moist air and dark aromas of this sultry womb, the native finds it difficult to breathe. Simple activities such as grocery shopping become bewildering obstacles to sanity. Ignatius Reilly said it best when he said, "Leaving New Orleans also frightened me considerably. Outside of the city limits the heart of darkness, the true wasteland begins." He wasn't joking. Neither are we.

Tom Piazza is a transplant. Which means that even though his polemic, Why New Orleans Matters demonstrates that he indeed gets it more than most. It may also explain why he still doesn't exactly get the politics. For some reason he is anti-EWE. I think this is a particularly bad failing for someone whose sympathies appear to be in the right place. But perhaps I am picking nits. Honestly I cried while reading parts of this book. I should add that I was drunk while reading those parts but this should in no way discourage you from checking it out.