Why New Orleans Matters first 3 chapters

The book reads almost like a travel guide. Piazza tells the reader where to eat and what areas to look for. He also lists musicians that the city is famous for. For the first three chapters I have learned about what Piazza is in to and have been given glimpses of the roots of the music and food. All of this is interesting and new to me, but it reads in a very biased way. Piazza loves EVERYTHING about New Orleans. There is nothing wrong with the city and everyone is an amazing character with a huge heart. There is no objectivity so the stories he tells come across as fantastic exaggerations. The stories might be completely true, but I have a hard time believing them completely because Piazza seems like he is trying to show how cool New Orleans is and how he is cool enough to know all of the famous people and can get in anywhere. Up to this point a better title for the book might be, Tom Piazza's Incredible Adventures in the Wonder Land of New Orleans. Also, he needs to stop with the long lists. Almost every page seems to have a list of 10 or more things, places, people, etc. It is like he is either showing off all the stuff he knows, or he is being sponsored by the things on the list so he can't leave anything out. I just want fewer lists and less of Piazza.

Why New Orleans Matters pre book club

Before I start to read Why New Orleans Matter by Tom Piazza I want to talk about why I chose this book. New Orleans to me is an almost mythic city. It has a culture so incredibly different and seemingly more interesting than the one I have grown up in. The appeal of the city itself and the tragedy of Hurricane Katrina are more than enough to pique my interest, but the thing that drew me in more than anything else is that I have learned a lot about people and government from this city. It would have been hard to imagine before Katrina that a major city could be destroyed so quickly. So much history lost in a matter of days. In the aftermath it became apparent that people were forgotten and that we were supposed to ignore this fact. Even now I have read about how people are not getting what was promised to them by the city, state, and federal government. I hope this book can shed some light on what New Orleans means to the people who live there, and what the cultural cost of Katrina has been.