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…

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…

‘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…

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…

City of a Million Dreams is history writing at its best, in which high-caliber prose manages to be as interesting as its subject.

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.”