Binge-Worthy Books of 2022
Our annual roundup of the year's locally-inspired literature
One of our favorite holiday traditions at Country Roads is to ask frequent contributor (former Arts & Entertainment Editor, current Managing Editor of 64 Parishes) Chris Turner-Neal to tell us about some of the best books he's read this year. With a keen perspective on local culture, a razor-sharp wit, and an appreciation for compelling voices—Turner-Neal knows a good thing when he gets his nose buried in it. This year, he's recommended tomes about big brown birds, hogs head cheese, and the anxieties of small town life, along with a Gilded Age thriller, a history on the yellow fever epidemic in New Orleans, and the biography of one of Louisana's most iconic gay activists. Read on, friends, then purchase your own copies of these pages, and read more.
Brown Pelican
by Rien Fertel
LSU Press
In 2013, the then-New Orleans Hornets announced they would rebrand as the Pelicans, giving themselves a local identity after their arrival from Charlotte and avoiding the eternally fish-out-of-water branding of the Utah Jazz. The overall initial reaction was horror—yes, the brown pelican is the state bird, but surely this feathered frump didn’t have the agility, the verve, the killer spirit an effective mascot needs? The naysayers, myself among them, were quickly shushed by a viral video showing a pelican casually eating a live pigeon: they were indeed hardcore.
Pelicans contain, along with pigeons, multitudes, as readers of Rien Fertel’s Brown Pelican will discover. A muse for Walter Anderson, a victim of the Belle Époque fashion craze for plumage, one of the species whose DDT-ravaged populations inspired the conservationist classic Silent Spring, and a medieval symbol of Christ—the “seine with the brain” has left a path through Western civilization that deserves study and celebration. Fertel clearly had fun following the pelican’s “career” through library and swamp, and the resulting blend of history, culture, and anecdote has the appealing energy of a conversation with someone who has just learned something interesting. (Aristotle, who deserves more credit for whimsy, thought pelicans contained little furnaces that let them digest bivalves.) As an added convenience, the book is printed in a small format, suitable for sliding into the top of stockings or carrying on a birding outing.
Southern and Smoked
by Jarred Zeringue
Arcadia Publishing
As a dedicated eater of organ meats, I can tell you truthfully that Jarred Zeringue’s head cheese is some of the best animal debris I’ve ever eaten. In a state where most people think they can cook and many of them are correct, his work stands out. I can’t say that I think the hogs are proud to end up in his kitchen, but they have no cause to be insulted. Zeringue now runs Wayne Jacob’s Smokehouse, a LaPlace institution bouncing back from Hurricane Ida and dispensing magnificent meat to those in the know.
[Read Chris Turner-Neal's 2021 local book selections here.]
Zeringue’s cookbook Southern and Smoked puts Cajun cooking in the context of the recent enthusiasm among cooks, eaters, and food writers for the seasonality of food. Yeah, sure, you can get [fruit/vegetable] any time of the year, flown in from a country you’ve never visited—or you can relax into the rhythm of the seasons, harvests following each other with the gentle, anticipatory rhythm of the liturgical calendar. This seasonal approach to a familiar cuisine is related in an appealingly straightforward voice that inspires trust—“People either love liver or they don’t. I don’t, so I tried smoking it.” And yes, the book included the recipe for head cheese.
(Full disclosure: I’m very casually acquainted with Zeringue, and an article about his smokehouse appeared in both 64 Parishes and an earlier edition of Country Roads. You know, I hope, that I would never lie about offal.)
We Were Angry
by Jennifer S. Davis
Press 53
Several years after we’d both moved away, my father and I drove through the town I grew up in. He looked out over the clots of fast-food joints and service stations and said, meditatively, “This is a crappy little burg, isn’t it?” Jennifer Davis’s We Were Angry, a collection of connected stories, takes place in a town like that, one of those “God, people live here” places that makes you decide to buy gas further down the road. Davis’s characters suffer from the corrosion of boredom and limited opportunities: one woman chooses between two bars across the street from each other, while another takes a course in bird identification in a failed attempt to “impress a man who knew the names of all living things except her.”
Because they know, consciously or merely instinctually, that they are almost trapped, Davis’s characters panic. It would be easy to make their frantic choices—feigning cancer, abandoning a sibling at an amusement park—farcical, but their author’s insight into why and how people on the ropes come up swinging makes them sad, compelling, and chillingly relatable. The added interweaving of the stories, with the protagonist of one story showing up as side characters or the subject of gossip in another, add to the small-town claustrophobia and tighten the net around the characters: they may be isolated, but they don’t have privacy. I rooted for most of these people, but I wouldn’t bet on them.
The Seamstress of New Orleans
by Diane C. McPhail
Kensington Publishing Corp.
Part thriller and part domestic drama, The Seamstress of New Orleans is an unusual but worthwhile historical novel. It takes place in 1899 and 1900, a historical dead zone as far as the American imagination is concerned: we like the Civil War and we like the Jazz Age, but this middle period of reconstruction and industrialization attracts fewer storytellers. The central characters, one a widow and the other an abandoned wife who rounds herself up to a widow for respectability, are unusual in their very normality: they’re not rebels chafing against the rules governing Gilded Age female behavior but working as effectively as they can within the roles they occupy. The thoughtful reader will relate to them all the more because of it—for every trailblazer, there are a dozen more people doing their best with what they can.
[Read Chris Turner-Neal's 2020 local book selections here.]
The novel also thoughtfully creates female spaces. Luncheons, charities, sewing rooms, and nurseries: the central characters move through spaces coded for—and ruled by—women. They leave them when they must, but when their errands are done, they return to the closed and orderly spaces in which they have learned to thrive. (Lest I make this novel sound sedate, there’s a murder in the first five pages, an organized crime shakedown, and an all-female Mardi Gras krewe.) There are faults—for example, race is never mentioned in a novel that takes place shortly before the Robert Charles riots killed over two dozen—but at its best, the story and its words are smooth as silk.
Necropolis: Disease, Power, and Capitalism in the Cotton Kingdom
by Kathryn Olivarius
Harvard University Press
If Kathryn Olivarius’s Necropolis had come out ten years ago, COVID-19 would have taken the same course, probably, but she would have had the satisfaction of waving her book in the air and yelling, “See?!” Wry and unsparing, this history of social attitudes around the constant yellow fever outbreaks in and around New Orleans informs, shocks, and entertains readers. Olivarius effectively argues that cultural reactions to yellow fever shaped the development of New Orleans’s economic role as the hub for slave-harvested cotton. New white arrivals who lived through the disease, becoming “acclimated,” were regarded as hardy survivors, trustworthy and creditworthy; meanwhile, the endless torrent of Africans forced to labor in the plantations that supplied cotton to New Orleans’s entrepots was justified by the false but convenient argument that they were immune. (Inconvenient Black deaths from yellow fever were blamed on the then-medically-indistinguishable dengue or malaria.) Olivarius has the narrative historian’s ear for turns of phrase, both her own (New Orleans was “more bilgewater than backwater”) and others’ (a British traveler writes that yellow fever and New Orleans were “as inseparable as ham and chicken.”) The resulting work is challenging and engrossing—as well as a powerful argument for public health literacy.
Political Animal: The Life and Times of Stewart Butler
by Frank Perez
University of Mississippi Press
The best biographies give you a sense of both the trajectory of a life and the substance of the person who lived it; if the subject is particularly engaging, you can walk away with a new friend (even if the relationship might be a little one-sided). The Stewart Butler who emerges from Perez’s pages—often in his own words, liberally quoted—is someone you’d love to have on your side. Fortunately, and before I realized it, I did.
Though we get to know and like Butler—and to envy his road trips and time in pre-state Alaska—in the first section of the book, we see him blossom later, as he finds his place as an activist. (As someone who will be thirty-eight years old by the time this is published, I drew enormous comfort from the fact that Butler turns forty on page 47 of this book.) Butler’s fight for fair treatment for queer people in the city and the country outlasted him and was full of two steps forward, one step back progress, but it also gave purpose and shape to a long and eventful life that, though the tallies may have been close, seems to have seen more joy than pain.