The Year Before the Flood A Story of New Orleans

With a style the "Los Angeles Times "calls as "vivid and fast-moving as the music he loves," Ned Sublette's powerful new book drives the reader through the potholed, sinking streets of the United States's least-typical city. In this eagerly awaited follow-up to "The World That Made New Orleans," Sublette's award-winning history of the Crescent City's colonial years, he traces an arc of his own experience, from the white supremacy of segregated 1950s Louisiana through the funky year of 2004-2005--the last year New Orleans was whole. By turns irreverent, joyous, darkly comic, passionate, and pol.