For many months after Hurricane Katrina, life in New Orleans meant negotiating streets strewn with debris and patrolled by the United States Army. Most of the city was without power. Emptied and ruined houses, businesses, schools, and churches stretched for miles through once thriving neighborhoods.
Almost immediately, however, die-hard New Orleanians began a homeward journey. A travelogue through this surreal landscape, A Season of Night: New Orleans Life after Katrina offers a deeply intimate, firsthand account of that homecoming. After the floodwaters drained, author Ian McNulty returned to live on the second floor of his wrecked house without electricity or neighbors. For months his sanity was writing this book on a laptop by candlelight.
By turns haunting, inspiring, and darkly comic, this memoir offers a behind-the-headlines story of resilience and renewal. From bittersweet camaraderie in the wreckage to depression and violent rampages in the lawless night to the first flickers of cultural revival and the explosive joy of a post-Katrina Mardi Gras, A Season of Night delivers an unprecedented tale from the wounded but always enthralling Crescent City. Learn more about the book and its author at http://www.seasonofnight.com/
McNulty’s account of the slow human recovery as people remade their lives, while elected officials produced a moribund recovery and continuing scandals, is a paean to the passion of workaday citizens who make the reduced city greater than its political parts.
Joy—and sorrow—are offered up in equal measure. . . . This book is McNulty’s heartfelt tribute.
This is more than a simple ‘storm story' and joins a tradition of evocative place biographies. The author develops his memoir beyond the events of August 2005 into an examination of what makes a community significant.
McNulty is a gifted writer, never overwrought or dramatic as in many Katrina memoirs. He writes with maturity, insight, and in gorgeous color both of the devastation and of a city regaining its charm in ragged spurts.
Ian McNulty has been writing about the life and culture of New Orleans since 1999 as a reporter, columnist, and author. He is a staff writer for the New Orleans Advocate, where he focuses on the food culture of one of the world’s great food cities, and his radio commentaries air weekly on the New Orleans NPR affiliate. He is author of Louisiana Rambles: Exploring America’s Cajun and Creole Heartland, published by University Press of Mississippi and named one of the top travel books by the Society of American Travel Writers.
