Product Description
Julia Reed went to New Orleans in 1991 to cover the reelection of former (and currently incarcerated) governor Edwin Edwards. Seduced by the city's sauntering pace, its rich flavors and exotic atmosphere, she was never entirely able to leave again. After almost fifteen years of living like a vagabond on her reporter's schedule, she got married and bought a house in the historic Garden District. Four weeks after she moved in, Hurricane Katrina struck. With her house as the center of her own personal storm as well as the ever-evolving stage set for her new life as an upstanding citizen, Reed traces the fates of all who enter to wine, dine (at her table for twenty-four), tear down walls, install fixtures, throw fits and generally leave their mark on the house on First Street. There's Antoine, Reed's beloved homeless handyman with an unfortunate habit of landing in jail; JoAnn Clevenger, the Auntie Mame—like restaurateur who got her start mixing drinks for Dizzy Gillespie and selling flowers from a cart; Eddie, the supremely laid-back contractor with Hollywood ambitions; and, with the arrival of Katrina, the boys from the Oklahoma National Guard, fleets of door-kicking animal rescuers and the self-appointed (and occasionally naked) neighborhood watchman. Finally, there's the literally clueless detective who investigates the robbery in which the first draft of this book was stolen. Through it all, Reed discovers there really is no place like home. Rich with sumptuous details and with the author's trademark humor well in the fore, The House on First Street is the chronicle of a remarkable and often hilarious homecoming, as well as a thoroughly original tribute to our country's most original city.
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 At times tedious and disappointing ( jimridgway )
I lived in New Orleans for several years, luckily I managed to move far away a couple of years before Katrina, so I missed all of that. So when I learned about this book I thought it would be fascinating to read about someone else's experiences living there and dealing with contractors and construction (like I did) and going through all the horror of Katrina. In the end, the book was not fascinating, it was a bit tedious, sometimes infuriating, and occasionally interesting and maybe even a little entertaining.
I don't want readers out there to think, based on the author's experiences, that all the locals hang out at Galatoire's drinking vodka all day because no one expects you to come back to the office after lunch. I worked for a living, I owned a tour company and later I had office jobs. I assure you if I spent all day drinking my lunch at a super expensive landmark restaurant someone would definitely care and I would dearly pay for it. In fact, I never knew any locals who ever even went to Galatoire's, no one I knew could afford it, and Galatoire's is considered to be mostly for tourists anyway.
Julia Reed is obviously pretty wealthy, so it was hard to identify with her or commiserate with her when her fabulous 6,000 square foot Garden District millionaire's mansion had a leak in the sunroom. It's hard to care when she gets a checking account from daddy with $5000 in it after she evacuates from the storm when so many other people didn't have anything. It's hard to give a damn when sometimes it seemed like all she really cared about was getting her servants back after the storm. My New Orleans friends and I never had servants, my house was nowhere near the Garden District, I lived in the 9th ward, I owned my own business and worked hard as hell so I could eat at places like Louisiana Pizza Kitchen, Angeli, and Coop's Place---none of which are expensive or owned by John Besh and other star chefs/friends of Reed's. And that's not to say that she should be criticized for being wealthy and having a far cushier life in New Orleans than I did, it's just hard to care about her and her story when she has so much and when I was there I watched most people all around me suffer daily under crushing poverty and extreme crime.
What I found rather repugnant was her attitude towards the people who came from all over the country to rescue the stranded and starving pets. She seems to find great sport in making fun of them and belittling their efforts. When she sees an aviary rescue van she wonders what's the big deal about rescuing people's pet birds while New Orleans has some wild parakeets that fly around the city. Well, maybe because these pet birds are not wild and they're not flying around the city, they're trapped in cages unfed and unwatered alone and dying in hot or flooded houses crawling with mold, maybe that's why there were people out there trying to rescue them. I found her comments ridiculous and unfeeling, she was more worried about getting her house finished, her servants back, and her expensive restaurant hang outs reopened so she could hurry up and get back to her normal leisurely life.
On top of everything, the author's obsession with alcohol throughout the entire book, mentioning it in some way just about every 2 pages or so, gets very tedious. Very few people I knew living in New Orleans were this obsessed with drinking, and the ones that were desperately needed rehab. Tourists, of course, go to New Orleans in droves specifically to drink and stagger around the garbage piled streets of the French Quarter, but honestly, all the locals I knew and did business with and were friends with all around the city were far too busy to sit around drinking and obsessing about fine wines and expensive liquors all the time. Julia Reed's New Orleans is nothing like my New Orleans, and that's a shame because the New Orleans I experienced was a lot more realistic and gritty, as well as fascinating and entertaining.
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 New Orleans, Like it or not is a continuing tragedy in the midst of charm. ( xpresstech )
In taking us from the comfort of observing yet one more upscale redo of a home and the ensuing 'perfect' life of the future occupants into the change of course Katrina forced upon every resident of New Orleans, Julia Reed exposes many of the shocking still kept secrets behind of the veil that has been dropped by the current administration over our collective memories about the horrific disaster and the even more appalling mismanagment of relief as perpetuated at every level of government in this country. The way people have found to survive, thrive, revive, and celebrate post-Apocalyptic New Orleans is touching, memorable, and a call to action. Julia's book is call to not forget Katrina, to not forget the underserved people in our land. Julia show us that they can be the poorest folks who are lost and also lost everything or the poor national guard who are doing their duty, living on the edge seeing horrific things daily, eating horrible rations, until Julia brings some real food and the touch of our common humanity to them, in their service to protect and help restore this iconic part of our country. Y'all read this inspiring book and then go forward to help lest we forget. It won't hurt if you commune to eat/cook/serve some good New Orleans food in the process! This is going to everyone on my gift list along with an invitation join me in action in New Orleans and in the myriad pockets of despair in this country. It is so nice and easy to take out your checkbook and to help folks far away, so very much harder to see and deal every day with what is right in front of you. So, mirror the grace and good humor of Juila Reed in her courageous coverage and restorative love: it won't hurt and it may be just what we need to save our wonderful country.
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 epicurean and heart-warming New Orleans memoir ( ola2170 )
In contrast to many other reviewers, I found "The House on First Street" a very enjoyable, warm, entertaining and highly educational read. I know that these adjectives, for some people, should not apply to the book describing New Orleans before, during, and in the aftermath of Katrina, and therefore they do not approve of the style this book was written in. For me, however, each event, however tragic, results in an explosion of creativity in many very different moods, which is always a good thing, because any work of art immortalizes the subject and makes it history (there are many comedies about World War II and Communism, for example, and they are appreciated even by the survivors - or maybe especially by them).
Julia Reed's memoir about her life in New Orleans, written in a brisk, magazine-style prose characteristic for a journalist, is a charming tribute to the Southern way of life. The epicurean (some would say hedonistic) descriptions of festive meals (I think it is remarkable, how she remembered or wrote down all the menus throughout the years), drinking in copious bars and pubs, parties, Mardi Gras parades, krewes, Carnival, unreasonable spending sprees, make the book a life-affirming proof of human nature. Even in the times so difficult as the post-Katrina year when life in New Orleans was as far from normal as could be, the city's inhabitants found a way to get back in style.
At the center of the story is Reed's house in the Garden District, and she concentrates on its purchase, history, renovation and visions of her future life there, meanwhile introducing many colorful characters and the portrait of the city. For me, whose knowledge of New Orleans and Louisiana history has been close to null, this book was a great introduction, especially that it provides a lot of references and (I hope) renders the spirit of the city and society in an easily approachable manner. The subject of tragic events caused by Katrina is introduced with a great dose of humor but solemn enough to give a grasp of their gravity, at the same time giving hope for New Orleans' future.
It is true that Reed's narrative can be perceived as infinitely snobbish (intended, I assume) and it took me a while to get used to her way of telling the story, also I was sometimes annoyed by her overuse of certain phrases (like "a tad"), but I read her book with pleasure and can recommend it as a good summer read for those who want something light, but more informative and serious than romance novels or detective stories.
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A New Orleans Story ( frizzle_mt )
This book is a memoir of building a life in New Orleans. Reed grew up in Mississippi, but found herself most at home in New Orleans. Even while writing for Vogue Magazine in New York, she kept an apartment in New Orleans. In 2002, she married a man she had met in New Orleans, and they began seeking a house to start their new life together. They purchased an old house in the French Quarter of the city and began renovating it. In August 2004, they finally moved into their house, just days before Hurricane Katrina devastated the region. In this book, Reed relates her ties to the city and her home, and she narrates her personal hurricane survival story, describing how she and her friends made their escape, and how they returned to the city after the hurricane and set about rebuilding their lives there.
Reed presents her story at a leisurely pace, pausing to reveal details of the personal lives of her friends, family, and employees. Anyone who has ever hired a contractor for house renovations will recognize some of the types who she brought in to work on her house--certainly her renovation story is one of run-of-the-mill incompetence and bad luck. What makes her story stand out among the reno literature, however, is its setting in New Orleans at the time of Hurricane Katrina. Reed must not only deal with shysters who can't wield a hammer, but also with conditions of near anarchy. Her story provides a glimpse into how the more upscale residents and restaurateurs of New Orleans survived the disaster, and why they were so determined to return.
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Utterly Charming Writing ( foscorb )
Julia Reed's book is the third nonfiction account I have read of Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath-- actually I could not finish Douglas Brinkley's THE GREAT DELUGE-- and certainly the most upbeat. After all her house only suffered a broken window from the storm. Like all good writers-- and that she certainly is-- she has the good sense to write about that which she knows, and should not be castigated because she has a beautiful house with what seems to be unlimited funds to restore a mansion to its former elegance. Ms. Reed writes with verve and humor about her neighbors, friends, employees and family and draws indelible pictures of them. She apparently has the uncanny ability to hire contractors, carpenters, plumbers et cetera whose only skill is running their tab up. Surely her contractor Eddie should be either sued, jailed or run out of town. Ms. Reed obviously cares deeply for her on-again-off-again-the-wagon helper Antoine. I liked tremendously her parents who live in Greenville, Mississippi, where Ms. Reed grew up, particularly her mother who insists on peeling tomatoes. I did not know that anyone on earth peeled fresh tomatoes but my own grandmother.
Ms. Reed moved to New Orleans in 1991 to cover a gubernatorial campaign and to spend time with a man she identifies only as "A" and, as do many persons, found she could not stay away for long, eventually married an attorney and bought the house of her dreams in the Garden District, previously owned by a relative of Walker Percy, and across the street from where Anne Rice lived for many years, before she moved to California and apparently began writing books about Jesus rather than vampires, just weeks before Hurricane Katrina struck. Ms. Reed, as does everyone else who has written about what she describes as the "biggest man-made disaster in the country's history" has nothing good to say about the president, the governor or the mayor. I didn't know that the mayor had said that Katrina was "divine providence for going to war in Iraq as well as the black-on-black crime rate that had for so long afflicted the city." (At least he didn't, like Evangelist Franklin Graham, blame Katrina on the rampant sins of the French Quarter. Never mind that the Quarter was left pretty much unscathed by the storm.) Reed's criticism of the Governor of Louisiana is worth quoting: "Then there was the question of what on earth had made the majority of Louisiana's electorate vote for Kathleen Blanco, who had not yet managed to call out the National Guard, and who appeared on the screen far too often, patting her hair and asking everyone to pray. A one point, the governor angrily told a reporter she had no idea what day it was, so I did pray--that she would cease to go near a television camera for the duration of the crisis." Reed contrasts the inepitude of elected officials with the courage and bravery of local citizens as well as people from all over the country who came to help including members of the New York Fire Department, all of whom were veterans of 9/11 and the 700 Oklahoma National Guard troops for whom Ms. Reed ordered and paid for from Podnuh's in Baton Rouge brisket and ribs and pulled pork, along with baked beans, potato salad and cole slaw. Like all Southerners, she understands that you eat your way through grief and tragedy and admits to gaining weight, known as the "Katrina Fifteen." At one point she says that the chefs, many of whom never left New Orleans and re-opened their restaurants almost immediately with only skeleton staffs "saved us." Ms. Reed seems to know where to find anything that has to do with food and/or drink in New Orleans including the best Bloody Mary, Cane River Country Shrimp, Alice B. Toklas's Cream Perfect Love et cetera.
THE HOUSE ON FIRST STREET is about what the title says it is: one writer's account of her love of that house and of the City of New Orleans, her adopted city, and how lucky she is, compared to other residents of that city. "And yes, a catastrophic hurricane had hit the city I'd finally chosen to live in amost immediately afterward, but it had all but spared our little patch on First Street--Eddie and crew, as we would continually find out, caused us a lot more damage than Katrina. Then there was our drive-through with the Guard, which had reinforced the notion that figuratively speaking, we were definitely eating cake. So it was in that spirit that we headed off to eat the real thing [to celebrate Reed's birthday] with my cousins whom I dearly loved and never saw enough of and who really believed. . . that our being together was an unexpected blessing of the storm."
If you can forgive the writer for not being Mother Teresa, then you will be both delighted and often moved by this book.
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