Mrs. Miniver (1942) depicts crumbling classdistinctions as the old-monied and haughty learnto pull together democratically with commontownspeople during the Battle of Britain. Chapter5, ‘‘Our Occupied Allies,’’ treats films aboutFrance and Norway, showing how they mini-mized attention to the real Quislings and Petainsof those countries and highlighted the ambiguitiesof collaboration—which might conceal forms ofdouble agentry that deserve our empathy. Chapter6, ‘‘American Men and Women’’ reminds us thateven the gangster genre turned patriotic in AllThrough the Night (1942), Lucky Jordan (1942),and Casablanca (1942) as resistant masculineheroes are socialized and redirected towardnational enemies. Among the depictions of wom-en, the authors emphasize Since You Went Away(1944) as a film suggesting war-induced, perma-nent social changes: ‘‘US postwar society will be amore complex, informal, inclusive democraticstructure than it had been before the war, and . . .this is a good thing’’ (239). Tender Comrade (1943)and So Proudly We Hail (1943) promise a similarpostwar upheaval in gender relations. This clusterreveals that feminism and evolutionary familyforms were at least partially anticipated andrationalized by such films, which some historianshave dismissed as sentimental pulp of no conse-quence. The authors also comment briefly on thepretense of American racial harmony, subtlyundermined in Casablanca when Sam, the AfricanAmerican piano player is absent from the ‘‘Mar-seillese’’ scene that symbolically affirms the unityof the Allied cause. A similar undercutting isnoted in Hitchcock’s Lifeboat (1944) when thecharacter ship’s steward, an African American, isquietly used to rebuke the ‘‘Finest Hour’’ rhetoricused to differentiate the goodness of us versus thebadness of the Axis powers.

The final Chapter 8, ‘‘Postwar Films in thePostwar World’’ takes us through 1946 with a finereprise of The Best Years of Our Lives (1946) andits rich evocation of problems that Americansociety would face. The authors show that Best

Years can be placed in the context of films such asHail the Conquering Hero (1944) and Christmasin Connecticut (1945) that also address problemsof adjustment for returning veterans and the homefront civilians who must learn to live with themagain. This genre is an excellent illustration of theauthors’ thesis that Hollywood sought and par-tially filled a role as the educator-storyteller,collectively creating a complete national narrativeof the war that attempted to wisely guide usthrough all its hazards. McLaughlin and Parry’sachievement in working out this argument meansthat every library of American studies or filmshould have this book. Scholars will appreciate itas a reference work for its detailed analyses ofsignificant films. For the classroom, it is destinedto be one of those rare books that both teachersand students can enjoy together. It opens thewindow to a vanished and deeply interestingworld that these pages recover with a sense ofsympathetic understanding.

—John Shelton Lawrence, EmeritusMorningside College

WhyNewOrleans Matters

Tom Piazza. New York: ReganBooks, 2005.

Do you hear that sound, that low moan,distinct from the din of mourning for Katrina’sdead and the utter physical destruction of vastexpanses of property and land in Louisiana andMississippi? More than a year after the devasta-tion brought by the tropical demon, that sad,synchronized song is growing distant. But it’s stillbeing heard and felt: Those who treasure theunique music, cuisine, architecture, and dialect ofNew Orleans continue to mourn the potentialloss of one of American culture’s great naturalresources.

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The tour books typically, and correctly, pointto the depth of American musical roots, themultiple variants of rock and roll, R&B, funk,even hip-hop, in the fertile soil of the city thatbirthed jazz. It is the home of Congo Square,from 1817 through 1856 a Sunday afternoongathering place for slaves. There, West Africanrhythms cross-pollinated with European melodiesand harmonies, intermingling with borrowingsfrom Latin America and the Caribbean.

Tom Piazza, a talented music journalist andauthor of non-fiction works (UnderstandingJazz) and novels (My Cold War), accurately andaptly relates the delights and profound cul-tural influence of the Big Easy in Why NewOrleans Matters, a personal and highly subjec-tive but insightful essay-length work thatamounts to essential, authoritative reading onthe subject. Written quickly during the weeksfollowing Katrina, Piazza’s breezy book istimely and incisive, and it handily fits MatthewArnold’s description of journalism—‘‘literature ina hurry.’’

Piazza begins by relating his own experience asthe levees failed, 80% of the city flooded, andunbelievably poignant television images of suffer-ing, seemingly abandoned poor residents werebeamed all over the world. ‘‘Corpses of neighbors,friends, family members, black and white, werescattered on the sidewalks; people had no sanitaryfacilities, no medical care, and the weakest wereeasy pickings for the predators among them,’’ hewrites of the goings-on at the Convention Center.‘‘Thousands lived through scenes out of Goya orHieronymus Bosch. Nobody came through . . . togive them some hope’’ (xi–xii).

The author, a New Yorker enamored of theexotic sound of New Orleans music—from JellyRoll Morton and Louis Armstrong to FatsDomino, Professor Longhair and Dr. John—moved to the Crescent City in 1994, aftergraduating from the Iowa Writers Workshop.But he fell in love with New Orleans in 1987,when visiting for the Jazz and Heritage Festival,

known as Jazz Fest to locals and devotees. Likeothers, he was astonished by what he saw, heard,smelled, and tasted at the annual festival, one ofthe most musically catholic events of its kind, anorgy of jazz, blues, gospel, Cajun, zydeco, brassband, folk, and rock music and a staggeringsmorgasbord of crawfish delights, red beans andrice, gumbo, and other local food specialties.

Piazza, not surprisingly, is at his best whenwriting about the city’s music. He correctlyassesses the influence of jazz pioneers, includingthe above and the Original Dixieland Jazz Band(responsible for the first-ever jazz recordings, in1917), trumpeter King Oliver, and clarinetistJohnny Dodds. He also touches on gospel singerMahalia Jackson and trumpeter Louis Prima, andnotes that the best early work of both RayCharles (‘‘Mess Around’’) and Little Richard wererecorded in New Orleans with local musicians.His prose really comes to life when describing hisreaction to the music of The Wild Tchoupitoulas,a group of Mardi Gras Indians backed by theMeters and the Neville Brothers on a stillresonant album released three decades ago:‘‘Down amid all those compelling funky-buttrhythms, and all those calls from the chief andresponses from the gang . . . I heard the essence ofwhat I had loved for years in jazz music, blues,bluegrass, and in rock and roll, that mixture ofopposite qualities—gravity and buoyancy, go-for-yourself spontaneity and absolute rhythmic pre-cision, seriousness and irony—delivered overcertain rhythmic patterns that lived at the centerof everything important to me’’ (48).

The national stage is occupied by ever-presentMiddle East crises, and the usual partisan politics.Meanwhile, the one-time jewel of the Gulf Coaststruggles for rebirth, its decimated populationreeling from a spike in violent crime and adamaged tourism industry (that despite respectableattendance for Jazz Fest and a truncated MardiGras) and its recovery bogged down in part bylocal officials tardy in providing a comprehensiveplan to spend the billions in federal funds allocated

161Book Reviews

for the region’s redevelopment. Meanwhile, NewOrleans’ advocates continue to plead for thesurvival of their city and its precious, endangeredculture; writing as passionate as Piazza’s stands achance of breaking through the clutter.

—Philip BoothUniversity of South Florida

WranglingWomen: Humor andGender in theAmericanWest

Kristin M. McAndrews. Reno: University ofNevada Press, 2006.

Most Americans—men, at least—still lookupon the American West through the lenses ofthe cowboy movie, where men do the hard work,the hard fighting, the hard living, then come backto the cabin and the arms of the traditionalwoman, who has supper ready and the bed warm.Such a world, of course, never existed, but the realworld was somehow distant and shrouded in themists of imagination. No matter its history,McAndrews, in this book, is trying to show theWest of today, and how the women balance theiracts between being cowgirls and horsewranglersby subverting and manipulating humor, language,and gender stereotypes a la Dale Evans. It is noeasy task because the women perhaps have alonger trail to climb. But humor is the greatequalizer as it always has been, and it is, to speakanimalistically, perhaps the finest horse thewomen, in seeking equality, can ride. All thehumor presented in this book is amusing. Some isoverwhelming. Like the story of the 300-poundlady who just loved horses and riding and want tohit the trail on one, only to discover that herweight so tired the horse that it almost passed out,she had to be removed, and the horse took two

days to recover. The book is filled with humor ofwoman–man, human–horse, human–mule rela-tions. And well worth reading. There is a lot formen to learn.

—Ray B. BrowneRay & Pat Browne Popular Culture Library

Bowling Green State University

Writing African AmericanWomen:An Encyclopedia of Literature byand aboutWomen of Color

Elizabeth Ann Beaulieu, Editor. Westport:Greenwood Press, 2006.

This deeply needed volume works under theassumption that we all should know, but some-times fail to consider, that all writings of and bywomen of color need to be studied and under-stood. This volume therefore ‘‘focuses specificallyon feminist and womanist approaches to AfricanAmerican literature’’ (x). The volume begins withLucy Terry, author of the ‘‘first known work ofliterature by an African American (the poem ‘Bar’sFlight,’ composed in 1746 but not published until1855)’’ and covers some four hundred alphabeti-cally arranged entries ‘‘that are appropriate forscholars as well as for advanced high schoolstudents, college-level students, and general read-ers’’ (xi). The volume might bring shame to somereaders because we know so little about the subject.But guilt removed by knowledge can only benefit.The two volumes in this collection do a great dealto ameliorate the ignorance most of us have on thesubject. It is welcome addition to all of us.

—Ray B. BrowneRay & Pat Browne Popular Culture Library

Bowling Green State University

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