Product Description

This engaging environmental history explores the rise, fall, and rebirth of one of the nation's most important urban public landscapes, and more significantly, the role public spaces play in shaping people's relationships with the natural world. Ari Kelman focuses on the battles fought over New Orleans's waterfront, examining the link between a river and its city and tracking the conflict between public and private control of the river. He describes the impact of floods, disease, and changing technologies on New Orleans's interactions with the Mississippi. Considering how the city grew distant--culturally and spatially--from the river, this book argues that urban areas provide a rich source for understanding people's connections with nature, and in turn, nature's impact on human history.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #264850 in Books
• Published on: 2006-05-01
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 308 pages

Review
"New Orleans' Mississippi levee, as Kelman explains in this fascinating study, is more than a pile of dirt. It is the key to unraveling the historical dialectic between a great river and an essentially amphibious city. It is also the monumental space of New Orleans' past, where dark plots and heroic dreams remain forever entangled." - Mike Davis, author of Ecology of Fear: Los Angeles and the Imagination of Disaster "Kelman has written a pioneering environmental history of the evolving relationship between one of the nation's oldest and most exceptional cities, New Orleans, and our greatest river, the Mississippi. For New Orleans, the river offered challenges and opportunities alike, providing the lifeblood of the city's commerce and a signature symbol of its identity even as it also brought floods, disease, and death. It is a fascinating story." - William Cronon, author of Nature's Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West"

Review
"In this fascinating new book, Alain Boureau dissolves the mystery surrounding the sudden appearance of witch hunts in the early fifteenth century. The early modern concept of the witch was made possible more than a century earlier as medieval demonology coalesced into an autonomous `science.' Around 1300 Scholastic theologians and papal consultants developed sacramental conceptions of the pact, Satan's relations with heretics, and the nature of magical assaults that bore tragic consequences until nearly 1700. Boureau's careful analyses of circumstances and arguments will make Satan the Heretic a classic in the intellectual history of witchcraft."-Walter Stephens, author of Demon Lovers (Walter Stephens )

"Satan the Heretic is an important contribution to the field of medieval demonology. Boureau contends that, contrary to common belief, medieval culture experienced a `peaceful' coexistence with demons, and that modern witchcraze emerged as a sudden and unexpected theological turn between 1280 and 1330. Boureau's belief in an `early' origin of Western obsession with demons and witches entails a far-reaching revision of this complex and fascinating phenomenon."-Armando Maggi, author of In the Company of Demons (Armando Maggi )

"An excellent account of the swift development of Scholastic demonology during the thirteenth cetnury."-Alastair Sooke, Times Literary Supplement (Alastair Sooke Times Literary Supplement )

"This is a valuable addition to the history of medieval demonology and magic."-Sophie Page, Catholic Historical Review (Sophie Page Catholic Historical Review )

"Essential reading for anyone who wants to understand the developing perceptions of demonology in the Medieval West." (Jacques Theron Studia Historiae Ecclesiasticae )

"A subtle analysis of a shift in ideas that would, eventually, lead to the severest and most corporeal ramifications. . . . Its readers must grapple not only with the persuasiveness of Boureau''s thesis, but also with the vitality of finely assembled intellectual history." (Christine Caldwell Ames H-France Review )

From the Inside Flap
"New Orleans' Mississippi levee, as Kelman explains in this fascinating study, is more than a pile of dirt. It is the key to unraveling the historical dialectic between a great river and an essentially amphibious city. It is also the monumental space of New Orleans' past, where dark plots and heroic dreams remain forever entangled."--Mike Davis, author of Ecology of Fear: Los Angeles and the Imagination of Disaster

"Kelman has written a pioneering environmental history of the evolving relationship between one of the nation's oldest and most exceptional cities, New Orleans, and our greatest river, the Mississippi. For New Orleans, the river offered challenges and opportunities alike, providing the lifeblood of the city's commerce and a signature symbol of its identity even as it also brought floods, disease, and death. It is a fascinating story."--William Cronon, author of Nature's Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West

"Kelman makes elegant sense of a story as tangled as the Louisiana bayous and tells his tale with a verve to rival that of New Orleans itself. A strong addition to American environmental history."--John R. McNeill, author of Something New Under the Sun: An Environmental History of the Twentieth-Century World

Customer Reviews

Interesting But Uneven
This is a book by an academic for academics. That being said, this topic ached to be addressed. Kelman has done his homework concerning the first two centuries of New Orleans' relationship with the Mississippi. The third (1918-present) seems to stop with the defeat of the notorious riverfront expressway. The river is likely (according to some scientists) to shift away from New Orleans, leaving the riverfront a muddy trickle. Kelman is silent on this. The degree of pollution and the efforts to clean up the lower part of the river go unsung as well. The last parts of the book have a rushed feeling, as if the expansive early history sapped the author's resources and there was little left worth saying. Lively it's not, but the book is important and a good reference work for further research.

get "Rising Tide" instead
There's nothing wrong with this book. It's a good book. But it pales beside a great book, John Barry's "Rising Tide," that covers much of the same material in greater depth, is infinitely better written, and which this book seems to have borrowed from. Kelman does give more of the early history than does Barry, as well as more about such things things as yellow fever. From an acadmeic perspective re: the geography of New Orleans, Richard Campanella's work is better also.