Bruce Rutledge

Rating: 5* of five

The Book Report: Very, very pregnant photographer, husband, dogs, and cats, all escape New Orleans barely ahead of Hurrican Katrina. Son is delivered, family is displaced, much of New Orleans is destroyed, to our lasting national shame, and family returns to rebuild and resume living in the place they love and call home. The story isn't new, and it's not the first time anyone anywhere has told it in this words-and-images fashion.

My Review: But no one else anywhere has Ms. show more Shaw's extraordinary and amazing eye; her terse prose style, so beautifully suited to both story and images; or her quite astounding luck in being published by this amazing press, Chin Music.

The book itself is worthy of being purchased simply to put on your front room's most prominent table. It is gorgeous. Bound in real cloth (my dog is still sniffing it, she's never encountered real cloth binding before) which is printed (let me assure you that this technique is faaar from simple, and its failure rate is significant; the technical demands on the printer, the designer, and the person making the color separations are quite significant; and the aesthetic that demanded this *exactly*right* production is quite rarefied) with an eerie, atmospheric image of great subtlety, the object itself begins its acquaintance with you by offering an uneasy glimpse into the mind of its makers. This will not be a candy-coated, literal, easy-to-process exercise in the journalism of indignance.

Opening the book, one reads the perfectly serviceable prose of two brief essays, one by Rob Walker, a former New Orleanian, and one by Ms. Shaw. Now we are mise en scene (oh, the badness of the pun), and the next page-flip takes you to spread 01: "We left in the dark of night." That's all she says in words. The photo facing the page bears a moment of painful clarity, expressed in a simple image of a red toy truck's tailgate retreating down a highly textured, shining road. The dark world closing in claustrophobically around this single spot of life, vividly red, the beautiful shining cobblestone-like texture of the road, the smoothness of the chiaroscuro (used properly, readers of Louise Penny's latest book!)...well, I could wax rhapsodic until you beg for mercy, but I won't. No point. Has to be experienced.

The use of toys and models to create the photo story is delightful. If I see one more image of people on a roof waving at the news copter while their house gives way beneath them, I shall scream blue murder. I avoid picture books of 9/11 for the same reason: I can't bear it. I've seen it! I've seen it! Stop smacking me! I won't look! But Shaw doesn't smack me. She wallops me ten minutes after I've seen her images. Dolls, with their awful starey eyes, usually make me uneasy. They still do here, but they are meant to, and they are deployed in simple, uncontrived story-telling, not some absurd, doomed effort to be archly Commenting On Life. The documentary "Marwencol" has much the same effect on me, and the same affect on its medium, as Shaw's dolls do.

And I must mention one thing in particular: Shaw's son is represented here by the King Cake baby. It's a nice, quiet, unpretentious symbol of her son's heritage. To someone without New Orleans knowledge, it's invisible and unnecessary to appreciate the story; to someone who knows what the symbol is, it's poignant and fitting.

Love New Orleans or loathe it, care about personal stories or not, this beautiful object should be in your home if for no other reason than to demonstrate quietly that you have excellent aesthetic taste and a real love for the object we call book. And the best part? It's only $18.

Buy one. Tell me I'm wrong. I dare you.


This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License. show less

Hurricane Story by Jennifer Shaw

It's hard to fathom what all the hand wringing over the DEATH of the book is all about when you see a book like Jennifer Shaw's [Hurricane Story]. Even without its remarkable text and photos it stands on its own as an object, hardly surprising considering the publisher, Chin Music Press through its imprint, Broken Levee Books. The book has a cloth over, real cloth that is, and not that oddly textured paper poseur, with lovely end papers and type. If the advent show more of the e-book age means that the remaining hard copies will be made to this level of beauty, and I see more and more evidence that this will be the case, then bring it on.

Inside is the story of Shaw's flight from New Orleans on the eve of Katrina, the birth in exile of her first child soon afterwards and her long journey home again. The text reads like a poem and is illustrated using photos of children's toys taken with a plastic camera. The colors are saturated, even vivid, and have an almost impressionistic quality. Somehow the use of toys to to re-enact her story makes it more touching and intimate than endless photos that came out following Katrina. It reminded rather of a psychologists us of toys to get children to enact traumas which they can't speak of. Highly recommended. show less

I haven't had as emotional a response to a book in a long time. There's little text here, it is what amounts to a picture book with small captions, but it encompasses the author's struggle with disaster of Hurricane Katrina in an amazing way. The soft, out-of-focus photography brings to mind a dreamland, or a nightmare, or both, and the vivid colouring brings a sense of reality to the dream. It feels as though the author has brought the reader closer to being 'inside' the mind of the author show more than most writers can achieve. It makes one feel that they are the ones living through the dream. The text gives the bare essentials to locate the picture in time and place, and to give a context to it in the drama of Katrina. Rob Walker's foreword is a good place to start. He's able to make the connection to New Orleans for those who haven't been there, though knowledge of the disaster is all that is necessary to take a person there through the photos and short, evocative captions. A worthy read, and a book to be enjoyed over again, to take one to a dreamscape different than one's own, but which was a real landscape. Greatly recommended! show less

Hurricane Story is a small book that packs a wallop! The simplicity of the text combined with the drama of the pictures is a perfect blend. Anyone who knows me knows I fell in love with New Orleans just as she was when we first met...just one year after Katrina. I wasn't there for the disaster, but I was there for the aftermath. Reading this little story took me back to the sights of devastation and abandonment and filled in that gap of what the residents of New Orleans endured in a way I show more can't describe. If you have a chance to read this book...take my word for it, it won't take long...then take it. But don't just read it. Look at it. The pictures tell the story as well. Beautifully done! show less