Unfathomable City: A New Orleans Atlas

by Rebecca Solnit, Rebecca Snedeker

Overview

Like the bestselling Infinite City: A San Francisco Atlas, this book is a brilliant reinvention of the traditional atlas, one that provides a vivid, complex look at the multi-faceted nature of New Orleans, a city replete with contradictions. More than twenty essays assemble a chorus of vibrant voices, including geographers, scholars of sugar and bananas, the city's remarkable musicians, prison activists, environmentalists, Arab and Native voices, and local experts, as well as the coauthors’ compelling contributions. Featuring 22 full-color two-page-spread maps, Unfathomable City plumbs the depths of this major tourist destination, pivotal scene of American history and culture and, most recently, site of monumental disasters such as Hurricane Katrina and the BP oil spill.



The innovative maps’ precision and specificity shift our notions of the Mississippi, the Caribbean, Mardi Gras, jazz, soils and trees, generational roots, and many other subjects, and expand our ideas of how any city is imagined and experienced. Together with the inspired texts, they show New Orleans as both an imperiled city—by erosion, crime, corruption, and sea level rise—and an ageless city that lives in music as a form of cultural resistance. Compact, lively, and completely original, Unfathomable City takes readers on a tour that will forever change the way they think about place.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780520274044
Publisher:	University of California Press
Publication date:	11/18/2013
Edition description:	First Edition
Pages:	176
Sales rank:	186,713
Product dimensions:	7.10(w) x 11.90(h) x 0.60(d)

About the Author

Rebecca Solnit is the author of many books, including Savage Dreams, Storming the Gates of Paradise, and Infinite City: A San Francisco Atlas, all from UC Press. Rebecca Snedeker is an Emmy Award–winning independent filmmaker and native New Orleanian.

Table of Contents

Introduction: Sinking In and Reaching Out

Map 1. A City in Time: La Nouvelle-Orléans over 300 Years
How New Orleans Happened, by Richard Campanella

Map 2. Ebb and Flow: Migrations of the Houma, Erosions of the Coast
Southward into Vanishing Lands, by Monique Verdin

Map 3. Stationary Revelations: Sites of Contemplation and Delight
On a Strange Island, by Billy Sothern

Map 4. People Who
Here They Come, There They Go, by Lolis Eric Elie

Map 5. Moves, Remains: Hiding and Seeking the Dead
Bodies, by Nathaniel Rich

Map 6. Oil and Water: Extracting Petroleum, Exterminating Nature
When They Set the Sea on Fire, by Antonia Juhasz

Map 7. Of Levees and Prisons: Failures of Containment, Surges of Freedom
Lockdown Louisiana, by Lydia Pelot-Hobbs

Map 8. Civil Rights and Lemon Ice: Three Lives in the Old City
The Presence of the Past, by Dana Logsdon and Dawn Logsdon

Map 9. Sugar Heaven and Sugar Hell: Pleasures and Brutalities of a Commodity
No Sweetness Is Light, by Shirley Elizabeth Thompson

Map 10. ¡Bananas!
Fruits’ Fortunes at the Gate of the Tropics, by Joshua Jelly-Schapiro

Map 11. Hot and Steamy: Selling Seafood, Selling Sex
Salacious and Crustaceous, by Evan Casper-Futterman

Map 12. The Mississippi Is (Not) the Nile: Arab New Orleans, Real and Imagined
The Ibis-Headed God of New Orleans, by Khaled Hegazzi and Andy Young 

Map 13. The Line-Up: Live Oak Corridors and Carnival Parade Routes
Sentinels and Celebrants, by Eve Abrams

Map 14. Repercussions: Rhythm and Resistance across the Atlantic
“It Enriches My Spirit to Be Linked to Such a Deep and Far-Reaching Piece of What This Universe Is”: A Conversation with Herreast Harrison and Donald Harrison Jr.

Map 15. Thirty-Nine Sundays: Social Aid and Pleasure Clubs Take It to the Streets
Rollin’ Wid It, by Joel Dinerstein

Map 16. Bass Lines: Deep Sounds and Soils
The Floating Cushion: George Porter Jr. on the City’s Low End

Map 17. Where Dey At: Bounce Calls Up a Vanished City
A Home in Song, by Garnette Cadogan

Map 18. Snakes and Ladders: What Rose Up, What Fell Down During Hurricane Katrina
Nothing Was Foreordained, by Rebecca Solnit

Map 19. St. Claude Avenue: Loss and Recovery on an Inner-City Artery
The Beginning of This Road, by Maurice Carlos Ruffin

Map 20. Juju and Cuckoo: Taking Care of Crazy
Holding It Together, Falling Apart, by Rebecca Snedeker

Map 21 . Lead and Lies: Mouths Full of Poison
Charting the Territories of Untruth, by Rebecca Solnit

Map 22. Waterland
The Cement Lily Pad, by Rebecca Snedeker

Acknowledgments
Contributors

Editorial Reviews

"With beautiful maps and challenging essays, Unfathomable City presents New Orleans as infinitely complex and ultimately unknowable. The result is not a comprehensive guide, but an invitation."  STARRED REVIEW

Shelf Awareness

"A beautifully creative and colorful atlas of New Orleans . . . a rich visual and literary banquet, serving up a kaleidoscopic array of perspectives on the city's multifarious peoples and their struggles and victories."

San Antonio Express-News

"New Orleans natives tell the same story in boardrooms and bus stops: Their city is a puzzle wrapped in a tease, a mystery scented by sweet olive and garbage, veiled by humidity, echoing with brass bands and the occasional gunshot. That’s the mystery probed on each page of Unfathomable City: A New Orleans Atlas, the grand, map-laden anthology assembled by local filmmaker Rebecca Snedeker and the celebrated essayist and thinker Rebecca Solnit. . . . Packed with colorful maps and essays by star writers, this atlas-with-attitude encompasses second-line parades, the banana trade, bounce music, the revival along the St. Claude Avenue corridor, and conversations with such iconic musicians as George Porter Jr. and Donald Harrison Jr." TOP 10 BOOKS OF 2013 FOR NEW ORLEANS READERS

Times-Picayune

"New Orleans natives tell the same story in boardrooms and bus stops: Their city is a puzzle wrapped in a tease, a mystery scented by sweet olive and garbage, veiled by humidity, echoing with brass bands and the occasional gunshot. That’s the mystery probed on each page of Unfathomable City: A New Orleans Atlas, the grand, map-laden anthology assembled by local filmmaker Rebecca Snedeker and the celebrated essayist and thinker Rebecca Solnit. . . . Packed with colorful maps and essays by star writers, this atlas-with-attitude encompasses second-line parades, the banana trade, bounce music, the revival along the St. Claude Avenue corridor, and conversations with such iconic musicians as George Porter Jr. and Donald Harrison Jr."—Top 10 Books of 2013 for New Orleans Readers

From the Publisher

"With Unfathomable City, Solnit and Snedeker have produced an idiosyncratic, luminous tribute to the greatest human creation defined by its audience participants: the city itself."

New York Times

"A fascinating look at New Orleans. Through 22 maps varying in their strange detail and beauty, each accompanied by an essay, Solnit and Snedeker put together a deep portrait of the city and so much of what makes it unique."

Cleveland Plain Dealer

"'Unfathomable City's' secret weapon is its imaginative cartography. . . . Each chart, like a plate in a restaurant, has ingredients and flavors that take the reader deep into the city's history. If you think you know these streets, this atlas will make you want to walk them again."

San Francisco Chronicle

"A deeply illuminating assemblage of maps and essays."

Chicago Tribune

"Unfathomable City is, like New Orleans herself, unique. Filled with twenty-two gorgeously illustrated and colored maps of the city, each spread across two pages, it’s an atlas that aims to both educate and challenge."

Mississippi Business Journal

"This book is part visionary road map, part post-­traumatic Katrina therapy and part poetic love ode/lament to our city. . . . After reading this book you’ll want to go out and map things that are important or quirky to you."

New Orleans Tribune

"Unfathomable City: A New Orleans Atlas is a book about New Orleans, but it's also a book about the kind of shared experiences and tensions that could exist in almost any city. Twenty-two maps illustrate ancient and recent histories of the Crescent City, with local tabs that inspire hums of pride. . . . Though many of those labels are specific to New Orleans, the themes they highlight exist other places, making the book not only a local's guide to the city, but also an anthropologist's guide to the idea of metropolis."

Gambit

"The book is a must . . . Unfathomable City is a real treasure."

Reference Reviews - Lili De Barbieri

"Beautiful cartography and from-the-street, intimate essays by lives lived in this city. My wanderlust was sated."

Peace News

"The maps are playful, colorful and alive—in contrast to the utility we're used to with online mapping sites and apps. They're a joy to study; New Orleanians will no doubt pore over the map depicting the ongoing revival of once moribund St. Claude Avenue and the parade routes of the city's archaic but surviving social-aid and pleasure clubs. Tourists familiarizing themselves with the city may spend more time on the "Repercussions" map, tracing jazz history and club locations, or Billy Sothern's "sites of contemplation and delight," featuring sculpture gardens, synagogues and Meyer the Hatter. . . . Ms. Solnit and Ms. Snedeker prove that atlases can still fire the imagination and incite wonder."

Wall Street Journal - Wayne Curtis

"The effect of Unfathomable City and the series of which it is a part is that of a healthy and bracing critique—one that we urgently need in this time of ubiquitous geographic information. It is a critique we should hope will extend to other American places as this lovely series continues."

Orion - Matthew Battles

"I love reading anything Solnit writes, for she is a thinker, and I appreciate her take on things."

Rosemary's Blog - Rosemary Byers

"Unique maps and eclectic essays pair to create a thought-provoking portrait of a singular city."

Manhattan - Anita Perala

"'Unfathomable City's' secret weapon is its imaginative cartography. . . . Each chart, like a plate in a restaurant, has ingredients and flavors that take the reader deep into the city's history. If you think you know these streets, this atlas will make you want to walk them again."

San Francisco Chronicle - David D'Arcy

"Rebecca Snedeker and Rebecca Solnit's Unfathomable City: A New Orleans Atlas is a book about New Orleans, but it's also a book about the kind of shared experiences and tensions that could exist in almost any city. Twenty-two maps illustrate ancient and recent histories of the Crescent City, with local tabs that inspire hums of pride. . . . Though many of those labels are specific to New Orleans, the themes they highlight exist other places, making the book not only a local's guide to the city, but also an anthropologist's guide to the idea of metropolis."

Gambit - Jeanie Riess

"A deeply illuminating assemblage of maps and essays."

Chicago Tribune - Lynell George

"The New Orleans the book charts is unfathomable 'because no two people live in quite the same city.' The twenty-two vignettes in this collection speak to that individual appreciation in twenty-three distinct voices, yet whatever the topic—apothecaries, lead poisoning, lemon ice, institutional abominations, sugar, bounce music, environmental calamities, shifts in the road, bananas—they burn bright, both breaking and gladdening your heart; and the handsome cartography is illuminating in the best tradition of maps: taking you there, for better or worse. . . . New Orleans may be porous as a sponge—in many ways, from its acceptance of refugees to water-charged soil types—but the writing here has a high specific gravity, a chewiness that makes you want to pay close attention and count your bites."

B&N Review - Peter Lewis

…this objet d'art is as infectious as a second line, an urban art form that the scholar-parader Joel (Heavy D) Dinerstein points out is named for its audience participants instead of its leaders. With Unfathomable City, Solnit and Snedeker have produced an idiosyncratic, luminous tribute to the greatest human creation defined by its audience participants: the city itself.

The New York Times Book Review - Daniel Brook

02/13/2017
New York City’s vitality and diversity are done justice in this third in a series of city atlases, following Unfathomable City: A New Orleans Atlas and Infinite City: A San Francisco Atlas. As editor Solnit states in her introduction to the present volume, her trilogy explores “what maps can do to describe the ingredients and systems that make up a city and what stories remain to be told after we think we know where we are.” The book includes 26 wonderfully inventive maps, presented in color on full pages and accompanied by essays by a variety of contributors, including historians, ethnographers, journalists, and novelists. The maps are often playful and idiosyncratic. Highlights include “Harper’s and Harpooners: Whaling and Publishing in Melville’s Manhattan,” “Mysterious Land of Shaolin: The Wu-Tang Clan’s Staten Island,” and a map entitled “City of Women,” which superimposes the names of women over stations on a subway map. Even lifelong New Yorkers fluent in their city’s history will find this work thought-provoking. Color illus. (Oct.)

Publishers Weekly

"An essential introduction to NOLA."

AFAR

"The maps are playful, colorful and alive—in contrast to the utility we're used to with online mapping sites and apps. They're a joy to study; New Orleanians will no doubt pore over the map depicting the ongoing revival of once moribund St. Claude Avenue and the parade routes of the city's archaic but surviving social-aid and pleasure clubs. Tourists familiarizing themselves with the city may spend more time on the "Repercussions" map, tracing jazz history and club locations, or Billy Sothern's "sites of contemplation and delight," featuring sculpture gardens, synagogues and Meyer the Hatter. . . . Ms. Solnit and Ms. Snedeker prove that atlases can still fire the imagination and incite wonder."

Wall Street Journal

"The effect of Unfathomable City and the series of which it is a part is that of a healthy and bracing critique—one that we urgently need in this time of ubiquitous geographic information. It is a critique we should hope will extend to other American places as this lovely series continues."

Orion

"A series of beautifully designed maps draw visual connections between the shifting landscape and points of human interest. Short and accessible essays discuss topics from reflective political commentary to whimsical points of intrigue . . . Distinctive, inviting, and will help draw you into this unique exploration of New Orleans.

Scout Magazine

"By addressing both the vibrant culture of public celebration (the second lines and the krewe parades and the near-constant festivals) and New Orleans’s bleaker side (environmental exploitation, the opportunism of the banana industry, the failures of post-Katrina authority), Solnit and Snedeker present an honest portrait. They delve deep into the city’s history, as far back as pre-European colonization, and resurface in the present, with bounce music and housing projects. Moreover, unlike many recent New Orleans books, they don’t overly dwell on Katrina to milk sympathy or a morbid interest from their readers. In short, Unfathomable City is beautifully balanced."

Oxford American

"The effect of Unfathomable City and the series of which it is a part is that of a healthy and bracing critique—one that we urgently need in this time of ubiquitous geographic information. It is a critique we should hope will extend to other American places as this lovely series continues."

El Orion

"A treasure trove of rich reminiscences that will be appreciated by the native, and appeal to past and future tourists."

City Book Review - Aron Row

"Importantly, the book never fetishizes New Orleans. By addressing both the vibrant culture of public celebration (the second lines and the krewe parades and the near-constant festivals) and New Orleans’s bleaker side (environmental exploitation, the opportunism of the banana industry, the failures of post-Katrina authority), Solnit and Snedeker present an honest portrait. They delve deep into the city’s history, as far back as pre-European colonization, and resurface in the present, with bounce music and housing projects. Moreover, unlike many recent New Orleans books, they don’t overly dwell on Katrina to milk sympathy or a morbid interest from their readers. In short, Unfathomable City is beautifully balanced."

Oxford American - Delaney Nolan

"With “Unfathomable City,” Solnit and Snedeker have produced an idiosyncratic, luminous tribute to the greatest human creation defined by its audience participants: the city itself."

New York Times - Daniel Brook

"New Orleans natives tell the same story in boardrooms and bus stops: Their city is a puzzle wrapped in a tease, a mystery scented by sweet olive and garbage, veiled by humidity, echoing with brass bands and the occasional gunshot. That’s the mystery probed on each page of 'Unfathomable City: A New Orleans Atlas,' the grand, map-laden anthology assembled by local filmmaker Rebecca Snedeker and the celebrated essayist and thinker Rebecca Solnit."

New Orleans Times-Picayune - Chris Waddington

"Unfathomable City is no standard atlas. . . . With beautiful maps and challenging essays, Unfathomable City presents New Orleans as infinitely complex and ultimately unknowable. The result is not a comprehensive guide, but an invitation."  STARRED REVIEW

Shelf Awareness - Pamela Toler

"A brilliant reinvention of the traditional atlas. . . . Compact, lively, and completely original, Unfathomable City takes readers on a tour that will forever change the way they think about place."

Examiner.com - Alan Petrucelli

"[New Orleans] history in tantalizing narrative nuggets; This book is part visionary road map, part post-­traumatic Katrina therapy and part poetic love ode/lament to our city; After reading this book you’ll want to go out and map things that are important or quirky to you."

New Orleans Tribune - Orissa Arend

"An elegant and fascinating volume of maps, essays and artwork. . . . The result is intelligent, often beautiful prose and compelling maps in an exciting exploration of the idiosyncratic details, gestures and rituals that determine how people inhabit, love and perceive this elusive and entrancing city."

Gambit - Katie Walenter

"A beautifully creative and colorful atlas of New Orleans . . . a rich visual and literary banquet, serving up a kaleidoscopic array of perspectives on the city's multifarious peoples and their struggles and victories."

San Antonio Express-News - Ed Conroy

"A fascinating look at New Orleans. Through 22 maps varying in their strange detail and beauty, each accompanied by an essay, Solnit and Snedeker put together a deep portrait of the city and so much of what makes it unique."

Cleveland Plain Dealer - Vikas Turakhia

"New Orleans is suffused with history, with mystery, with violence, and with sublime beauty. From shrimp po-boys to extravagant Mardi Gras floats, from the enormous live oaks lining St. Charles Avenue like silent, ancient sentries to second-line parades with loud brass bands weaving their way over pothole-laden streets, New Orleans leaves an impression. Trying to understand and make sense of all the facets of the place, and all the attendant contradictions, is a task with seemingly no end. The beautiful Unfathomable City: A New Orleans Atlas can help with this, and I’d highly recommend it to anyone the least bit infatuated with the Crescent City. Part coffee table book, part history and culture guide, Unfathomable City is, like New Orleans herself, unique. Filled with twenty-two gorgeously illustrated and colored maps of the city, each spread across two pages, it’s an atlas that aims to both educate and challenge."

Mississippi Business Journal - LouAnn Lofton

"I love reading anything Solnit writes, for she is a thinker, and I appreciate her take on things."

Rosemary's Blog - Rosemary