Letters from New Orleans by Rob Walker

Letters from New Orleans Reviews

• 
  audrey

  Thirtysomething dude moves from NYC to New Orleans and proceeds to report back to his friends and family on it. Then decides to provide analysis on things like New Orleans neighborhood gentrification, historical strife and culture. This goes about as well as you'd expect, but maybe my expectations for Thirtysomething dudes from NYC are pretty low.
  

  "In most metropolitan areas, housing projects are hidden away in the fringes. In New Orleans, many are woven throughout the city. One is just a couple blocks from the tourist-beckoning French Quarter; I pass two complexes every time I drive to the gym."

  
  

  "Q: Why did you choose New Orleans?
  
  A: Once 'Page Six' was available online, it became possible to live anywhere. There's no reason that the new Avenue C might not be beyond the East Village, beyond Williamsburg or Long Island City. It could be anywhere. Right?"

  
  Basically: 200 pages of "Don't get me wrong, I love living in New Orleans, but..." followed by an example of what the author considers odd or picturesque that explains why this country thought Manifest Destiny was a fine idea. There are also tiny black-and-white photos sprinkled throughout the book that would've been awesome if they were big enough for any details to be discernible by the naked eye. Or the squinting-through-glasses eye. Instead, they're all meticulously 2"x2" squares set in the middle of blank white pages.
  
  (Somewhere, off in the distance, a professional book designer just threw an ancient copy of Adobe Pagemaker through a wall.)
  
  There's a briefly interesting interlude near the beginning involving a Miami Vice critical studies reader, robots that shoot fire and Richard Linklater's Slacker, but it's not remotely enough to save the rest of the book.
  
• 
  Kiren

  The real New Orleans from an insideoutsider's p.o.v. I wish I could write like this.
• 
  Jenny

  In 2008, a few years after Hurricane Katrina I spent a lot of time in New Orleans working with various nonprofits that were working on the rebuilding process (yes it was still a mess three years later and a lot of rebuilding was going on). A lot of people either strongly love or strongly hate New Orleans. I both strongly love and hate it. It's dirty, it's uncomfortably hot and humid, and it has become unsafe over the years. But it is also gorgeous, the architecture is great, the food is amazing, the people are kind and helpful, the festivals and parades and music and parties are fun. I don't think I'd ever be able to live there, but I do think back on my time there fondly. This is a series of letters a man wrote about moving to New Orleans with his girlfriend after living in Manhattan for years. I could relate to a lot of things in this book. The letters stop in 2003, so this is pre Hurrican Katrina which is a different way for me to look at New Orleans since my main focus while I was there was fixing what the Hurricane left behind and since it was still fresh in the memory of the people there most people wanted to talk about that. I've read a few books dealing with New Orleans since I was there and most were post Katrina accounts from the city. It was fun to read about the city before everyone had a Katrina story to tell (of course Katrina stories are worthwhile in a lot of cases it was just nice to not read about that when reading about New Orleans for once).
• 
  Brett

  Occasionally funny, occasionally insightful, but perhaps not adding up to all that much in the end.
  
  I've only been to New Orleans one time, when I was maybe 16, to attend the Lutheran National Youth Gathering. It is, to put it mildly, not the best age nor the best reason to visit the city.
  
  Walker appeared to go out of a desire for change, I guess. It's never exactly clear what his project is. This book is a collection of emails he sent to his friends after moving from NYC to New Orleans. It touches on all sorts of topics, from Mardi Gras, to gentrification, to jazz, to public funerals. It was penned in the few years before Katrina. In a way, it's too bad that the author left before the storm. He does have a good eye for observation, and I would have been interested in his view of the impact and lingering effects.
  
  It's certainly punchy and readable, and the book is quite short, but I don't see anything from this slight volume staying with me.
• 
  Kathleen Carlin

  I have had this for quite a while and pulled it out because I wanted something short to read to get caught up on my 2020 Reading Challenge. True story. As I read, I moved around from one writing to another as Walker cross-referenced, meandering much like these pieces do. The two most significant things I noticed were several typos - it’s a character flaw - and how in each piece he said something which struck as me fundamentally true yet often forgotten.
• 
  Diann Blakely

  Pre-Katrina, Rob Walker, a staff writer for the THE NEW YORK TIMES, documented a three-year sojourn in New Orleans--including holiday festivities featuring bullets, not fireworks--by writing e-mails to his friends. Many forwarded them to their own cyber-pals and posted them on websites. Walker collected the e-mails in LETTERS FROM NEW ORLEANS, Land the book not only became a cult bestseller, but also a model for David G. Spielman’s THE KATRINAVILLE CHRONICLES (see review of this book here also).
• 
  Jerry Oliver

  This was a very interesting book that gets to the heart and soul of New Orleans. It is particularly interesting to me now that I have a son, daughter in law and grandson who live in New Orleans.
  Also of interest is the fact that this book was written before Katrina. Now everything you read has to tie in Katrina but it's still the same city with many of the same characteristics, both good and bad.
  Anyone who has a relationship with this city will find a lot to glean from this collection of letters.
• 
  Jessica

  This book is a collection of letters from a Texas-born NYC journalist who moves to New Orleans with his girlfriend. He writes to friends, family and anyone who is curious about his NOLA experience. Many of them made me homesick. Several reminded me of things I had forgotten about or revealed parts of New Orleans I never knew. And a couple made me cry. Great little book. I would definitely recommend it.
• 
  James

  I really enjoyed this book. at first glance, I thought it was a post-Katrina collection, but actually written by a guy who lived there from 2000-2003.
  I loved the way he describes first moving to New Orleans and the comments about New Orleanians being ' so completely unselfconscious '. He had me with that. and the rest of his observations made me think of my first experiences in the city and how much I miss it.
• 
  Theadra Chapman

  very interesting reading about New Orleans. Very personal observations pre-Katrina. I wondered what the author would have to say these days?
  
  my one criticism would be that it felt thin. Not in pages, in details. If all "chapters" would have been like "St. James Infirmary" the book would have been 3x more enjoyable.
• 
  Mark

  Good book. I think the author captured much of the spirit of New Orleans. A little eerie in that much if not all, was written before Hurricane Katrina. By the end, I think the author soured on New Orleans in the way that people not from there sometimes do after living there awhile, but all in all, not bad.
• 
  Beth

  I love this man's appreciation for my city. If you want an accurate depiction of life in New Orleans, read it, and then read Confederacy of Dunces. Then write me with your questions and i'll do my best to illuminate, expand, expound and explain.
  
• 
  Nerissa

  Having just been in New Orleans last month, this was a really interesting book to read. It dragged a bit towards the end, but I suppose if you read it more in pieces, rather than straight through, that problem would be alleviated.
• 
  Regina Hart

  I just can't get enough of New Orleans. Rob Walker captured so many of the city's features, both enchanting and baffling. Given that the book was written prior to Katrina, there is an eerie quality to reading it in the present day.
• 
  Rachel

  There's a passage in this book (which was written pre-Katrina) lamenting the lack of government help for the poorest parts of the city, and Walker comments on how at least in a bigger disaster the government would eventually help. A rather optimistic view, it seems, in hindsight.
• 
  Jessie

  i really like the
  toni morrison exchange idea- i think we should get it started.
• 
  CS

  An interesting, thoughtful, entertaining series of letters about living New Orleans.
• 
  Renee Blanchard

  This was a good beginners guide to living in New Orleans. If you haven't been and want to know more, this is a good starter kit.
• 
  Michael

  I didn't get anything out of this that Treme didn't communicate with a better soundtrack. The disarming Postscript was a nice touch, though.
• 
  Andrea

  Nice collection of essays about one of my favorite cities.
• 
  Sarah Ellison

  The letters from New Orleans give an insider's view of the city. Even though it is the number of years old now, I found most of what Walker spoke about to be quite relevant today. I read much of it on the plane down to New Orleansand felt like I knew a lot about the city when I started to wander through it.
• 
  PG Minder

  I really didn't think that I would like this book...but once I started reading I was fascinated by the stories of this interesting city and its residents. This experience was like watching some strange and unusual behavior, but you just can't take your eyes off of. The most intriguing premise for me was references to everyone having a real self-the one that we and God above knows and then the one that we present to everyone...and which is real. I think everyone has two or more sides (and usually one we don't want ANYONE to know about,lol)....but an interesting read...plus the idea of moving to new place and figuring out how to integrate within a totally new environment is always interesting. Good stuff!