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‘City of a Million Dreams’ looks at New Orleans through the lens of jazz funerals
By Jon Garelick The Boston Globe, June 15, 2023
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Francis ‘light years ahead’ of other popes in tackling abuse scandal, says pioneering journalist
By Patsy McGarry Fri Feb 3 2023 The Irish Times An American journalist who was one of the first reporters in the world to expose the clerical child sex abuse scandal in the Catholic Church says Pope Francis “has gone far…
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Life, death and jazz funerals: Jason Berry’s ‘City of a Million Dreams’
By Nathan Stubbs, The CurrentLA Twenty-five years in the making, Berry’s new documentary is a historical portrait of New Orleans and its enduring Jazz Funeral tradition Film still courtesy Jason Berry There’s a scene in the documentary City of a Million Dreams of…
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‘City of a Million Dreams’ Review: The band plays on
By Alex De Vore, Santa Fe Reporter Author and journalist Jason Berry has certainly not been coy about his love for the city of New Orleans, or the cultural and musical traditions that hail from the fabled Louisiana metropolis. Berry was…
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New Books in the American South: Interview with Jason Berry
With Emily Ruth Allen | New Books Network In City of a Million Dreams: A History of New Orleans at Year 300 (University of North Carolina Press, 2018), Jason Berry delivers a history of New Orleans at its tricentennial. Beyond its ancient…
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The jazz writer: Jason Berry’s quest to understand the place where he’s from
By Tom Roberts, National Catholic Reporter Jason Berry loves character-driven narrative. He’s good at writing it, sending wonderfully drawn figures, whether wretches of the clerical sort or zany, colorful Louisianans, on journeys along a tight weave of data and history. And…
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Where Bolden boldly fails, City of a Million Dreams enchants
By Quin Hillyer | Washington Examiner With 2019 being the year of movies celebrating British-originated rock music of the 1960s (Beatles) and 1970s (Elton John and Queen), Americans should take time to view a film about our own most indigenous…
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Book elucidates contradictory history of New Orleans, a city that is a crossroads of humanity
by Alex Mikulich | National Catholic Reporter Not unlike the millennia of silt layers that created this crescent-shaped, flood-prone land mass 90 miles north of the Gulf of Mexico, la Nouvelle Orléans is a complex, multilayered cultural mosaic that is, perhaps, both plainly…
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A Father, a Daughter and a Film
By Kim Singletary, Biz New Orleans Author and filmmaker Jason Berry’s latest project hits especially close to home. In honor of Father’s Day this month, I thought I’d share the story of a father and daughter I’m honored to know…
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Bayou to Beltway: May 8, 2019
This week Bayou to Beltway talks with author and historian Jason Berry. Mr. Berry became well-known for his pioneering investigative reporting on sexual abuse in the Catholic church, which he first covered in the Times of Acadiana and then in…
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Editorial: George Weigel, wrong then, wrong now
by NCR Editorial Staff The Catholic University of America decided to give the final guest speaker spot in its commendable series of four programs examining the priest sex abuse crisis to George Weigel. That was unfortunate, because his long-discredited narrative…
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The triumph of New Orleans, the tragedy of the Catholic Church. A conversation with Jason Berry.
by Christiaan Mader By the mid-1990s, journalist Jason Berry wanted to move on from writing about the Catholic Church. His landmark book, Lead Us Not Into Temptation, published in 1992, was an incendiary act of reporting, breaking wide open a clergy sex abuse…
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New York Review of Books: City of a Million Dreams
By Garry Wills | The New York Review of Books The City That Wouldn’t Die Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans in August 2005, devastating an area seven times the size of Manhattan, flooding 80 percent of the city, ruining buildings, forcing…
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PRX: IdeaSphere with Jason Berry
Host Guy Rathbun In his book, City of a Million Dreams: A History of New Orleans at Year 300, author and documentarian Jason Berry opens his story with an iconic New Orleans funeral in 2015. He then juxtaposes the lavish…
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Kansas Public Radio: Conversations with Jason Berry
by Dan Skinner | Kansas Public Radio On this edition of Conversations, Jason Berry talks about his latest book, City of a Million Dreams: A History of New Orleans at Year 300. Berry is an award-winning writer, investigative reporter, and…
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‘City of a Million Dreams’ is a Lucid, Lyrical Masterpiece
By Lamar White, Jr. | The Bayou Brief Award-winning writer Jason Berry’s new book is the definitive history of New Orleans, a 300-year-old city that challenges, defies, yet still exemplifies the American mythos. For his final article of 2018, publisher…
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Catholic history of New Orleans highlighted during 300th anniversary
By Christopher White | Crux Thirty years ago, investigative reporter Jason Berry pioneered new territory by covering clerical sexual abuse in Louisiana. Since then, his name has become synonymous with the crisis that continues to loom over the Catholic Church today.…
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‘City of a Million Dreams’ a love letter to New Orleans
By Ed Conroy | Houston Chronicle In his poem “Gulf Music,” former poet laureate Robert Pinsky writes, “The past is not decent or orderly. It is made up and devious. The man was correct when he said it’s not even…
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The Wall Street Journal Review: City of a Million Dreams
‘City of a Million Dreams’ Review: Every Day a Parade A bold, witty, character-driven history of New Orleans, just in time for its tricentennial. Before Benjamin Latrobe could see New Orleans, as his passenger ship cut through dawn fog in…
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Publishers Weekly Review: City of a Million Dreams
Berry (Lead Us Not into Temptation) delivers an evocative, character-driven narrative history of New Orleans, highlighting its multiculturalism, love of spectacle, and resilience through fires, floods, and wars. In a detailed, novelistic style, Berry underscores the city’s influential inhabitants, including…
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In a long career, writer Jason Berry turns homeward again in ‘City of a Million Dreams’
By Susan Larson | Special to The Advocate Jason Berry is one of the great journeyman writers of New Orleans, a virtuoso of genres. He has done it all — straightforward journalism (“Lead Us Not Into Temptation: Catholic Priests and the…
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Money, hurricane, death: ‘City of a Million Dreams’ mulls history of second-lines, jazz funerals
By Sue Strachan | New Orleans Advocate It was the last day of filming “City of a Million Dreams: The Untold Story of Funerals in New Orleans,” and as the cast and crew milled about in the early morning sun,…
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Here and There with Dave Marash
The creation of a global constituency of ethically demanding believers who want a Catholic Church with zero tolerance for sexual abuse of children or for those who enable or protect the predators has been the work of a little less than half a lifetime for our guest today, Jason Berry.
Reviews
Foreword Review: City of a Million Dreams
City of a Million Dreams is history writing at its best, in which high-caliber prose manages to be as interesting as its subject.
Reviews
Kirkus Review: City of a Million Dreams
Confederate center, strategically important port, birthplace of jazz, setting of tragedy and disaster, and now a site of gentrification: Berry nimbly covers New Orleans in all its aspects over 300 years, “a map of the world in miniature, a blue city floating against the odds of sea rise and climate convulsions, blue forever in its long sweet song.”
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On the Fly Interview with Jason
Jason Berry cannot and will not stop heaping trouble on the Vatican. In 1987 he exposed rampant pedophilia in the American Catholic priesthoods. Now, in his recently published expose Render Unto Rome: The Secret Life of Money in the Catholic…
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On the Fly Interview with Jason
Few reporters, and even fewer Catholic reporters have spent as much time and effort investigating the Roman Catholic Church as Jason Berry. In 1987 he exposed the pedophile priest scandal in the US. Here he is going after The Vatican…