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Frommer's New Orleans 2011 (Frommer's Complete Guides)

Completely updated every year, Frommer's New Orleans features a full rundown of the unique experiences that await you.
Our author hits all the highlights, from the French Quarter to the Garden District to Mid-City and beyond. She's checked out all the city's best hotels and restaurants in person, and offers authoritative, candid reviews that will help you find the choices that suit your tastes and budget.
You'll also get up-to-the-minute coverage of shopping and nightlife; an in-depth look at Mardi Gras; detailed walking tours; accurate neighborhood maps; advice on planning a successful vacation; and side trips to Cajun Country and the nearby plantation homes.
Frommer's New Orleans also includes a color fold-out map.

Last night I spent the night in a cheap motel with a woman who wasn't my wife.

You can start breathing again, I wasn't cheating on my lovely wife. Our chief evil minion Lindsey and I are on our way to PyrateCon in New Orleans. This was the most reasonably priced motel we could find when exhaustion set in. Is that simulated wood grain on that tv? And the walls, and the bathroom...

Alas, Rossana is leading a very popular ghost hunt at the Mansfield Reformatory that won't be done till Midnight Friday night and there are no reasonable flights to the Big Easy at all. This is an untested show and it might be a bust. I pray silently to the Ferengi gods of commerce that it isn't. Gas is an arm and a leg.

On the up side, we've been listening to 'The Lost Painting' by Johnathan Harr. It is a great detective style story about the search for a lost Caravaggio painting. It's suprisingly engaging and I now know more about Renaissance artists, Italian archives and art historians as well as art restoration. Now I just need someplace I can show off this knowledge and maybe drop some names of famous Caravaggio researchers. Maybe the next time I hit Quaker Steak and Lube or the Great Wall Chinese buffet.

From Wikipedia.com: " The Pitt-Jolie family divides its time between Los Angeles, California and New Orleans, Louisiana. In an interview with the Times-Picayune, while filming The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, Pitt said:
“ I can't describe why we're allowed to live a more normal life (in New Orleans). Living in the French Quarter is a thrill for us. We have some semblance of real family life. People have been very, very gracious with us. If we're on the front deck, people go by and say, 'Hi.' Then they go on their way, very friendly.”

In December 2006, Pitt gathered a group of housing professionals together in New Orleans to begin planning a project that Pitt calls Make It Right, with the goal of financing and constructing 150 new houses in New Orlean's Ninth Ward. The houses are being designed with an emphasis on sustainability and affordability, with the hope that the project can and will be replicated throughout the city. Thirteen architectural firms are involved in the project, many of which are donating their services. Pitt and philanthropist Steve Bing have each committed to matching $5 million in donations".

Nines Lives is a multivoiced biography of a dazzling, surreal, and imperiled city, told through the lives of nine unforgettable characters and bracketed by two epic storms: Hurricane Betsy, which transformed New Orleans in the 1960s, and Hurricane Katrina, which nearly destroyed it. Dan Baum brings this kaleidoscopic portrait to life, showing us what was lost in the storm and what remains to be saved.

Book Description
The hidden history of a haunted and beloved city told through the intersecting lives of nine remarkable characters.

After Hurricane Katrina, Dan Baum moved to New Orleans to write about the city’s response to the disaster for The New Yorker. He quickly realized that Katrina was not the most interesting thing about New Orleans, not by a long shot. The most interesting question, which struck him as he watched residents struggling to return, was this: Why are New Orleanians—along with people from all over the world who continue to flock there—so devoted to a place that was, even before the storm, the most corrupt, impoverished, and violent corner of America?
Here’s the answer. Nine Lives is a multivoiced biography of this dazzling, surreal, and imperiled city through the lives of nine characters over forty years and bracketed by two epic storms: Hurricane Betsy, which transformed the city in the 1960’s, and Katrina, which nearly destroyed it. These nine lives are windows into every strata of one of the most complex and fascinating cities in the world. From outsider artists and Mardi Gras Kings to jazz-playing coroners and transsexual barkeeps, these lives are possible only in New Orleans, but the city that nurtures them is also, from the beginning, a city haunted by the possibility of disaster. All their stories converge in the storm, where some characters rise to acts of heroism and others sink to the bottom. But it is New Orleans herself—perpetually whistling past the grave yard—that is the story’s real heroine.
Nine Lives is narrated from the points of view of some of New Orleans’s most charismatic characters, but underpinning the voices of the city is an extraordinary feat of reporting that allows Baum to bring this kaleidoscopic portrait to life with brilliant color and crystalline detail. Readers will find themselves wrapped up in each of these individual dramas and delightfully immersed in the life of one of this country’s last unique places, even as its ultimate devastation looms ever closer. By resurrecting this beautiful and tragic place and portraying the extraordinary lives that could have taken root only there, Nine Lives shows us what was lost in the storm and what remains to be saved.


Amazon Exclusive: Dan Baum on Nine Lives

Hurricane Katrina was the kind of event a reporter waits his entire life to cover. It was especially satisfying doing so for The New Yorker. While newspaper and television reporters chased about feverishly in their attempt to feed the insatiable daily news monster, I enjoyed the time to go deep and peel back the tragedy in all its complexity. I wrote half a dozen short “Talk of the Town” pieces and two long articles over the following year.

Even working for The New Yorker, though, covering Katrina and its aftermath became frustrating. The longer I stayed in New Orleans, the more I understood that huge as Katrina was, it is hardly the most interesting thing about New Orleans. New Orleans is the most unusual place I’ve ever been—complicated, sensual, self-contradictory, hilarious, infuriating—and it was the place itself, not the tragedy that befell it, that I wanted to write about.
So when my wife and I thought about writing a book, it wasn’t a “Katrina book” we had in mind. We finally settled on interweaving the life stories of nine New Orleanians—rich and poor and in between, black and white and in between, male and female and in between. Nine Lives begins in 1965, right after the last time a big part of the city flooded during a hurricane. By this we want to say: New Orleans was there a long time before Hurricane Katrina and it will be there a long time after. Katrina doesn’t show up in Nine Lives until past page 200.
We had two guiding principles: No bad guys, and all happy endings. All nine of these people are, in their own way, heroes. And while we could have ended any of their stories on a down note, we instead end all at a moment of ascendance. There are many ways of looking at New Orleans, but this is how we chose to do so in Nine Lives.
We were careful not to make Nine Lives the kind of "issue" book one must read to understand current events. We want people to read it for the same reason they read The Kite Runner or The Bridges of Madison County—out of love of the characters and a warm, delicious eagerness to see their lives unfold. New Orleans is above all, a fun place, and we tried to make Nine Lives as much fun to read. —Dan Baum