Code: 44782945

Getting Off at Elysian Fields

Name: Getting Off at Elysian Fields
Brand: University Press of Mississippi
SKU: 44782945
Price: 18.25 EUR
Availability: InStock
Author: John Pope
ISBN: 9781496853622

by John Pope

Language: English
Binding: Paperback
Number of pages: 360
Publisher: University Press of Mississippi, 2024
More about this

18.25 €

RRP: 24.28 €

You save 6.03 €

In stock at our supplier
Shipping in 14 - 21 days

Add to wishlist

How to Rap
12.70 € -25 %
Buy
Virtually Human
20.17 € -10 %
Buy

Give this book as a present today

Order book and choose Gift Order.
We will send you book gift voucher at once. You can give it out to anyone.
Book will be send to donee, nothing more to care about.

Book gift voucher sample Read more

You get 44 loyalty points

Book synopsis

No city in America knows how to mark death with more funerary panache than New Orleans. The pageants commemorating departed citizens are often in themselves works of performance art. A grand obituary remains key to this Stygian passage. And no one writes them like New Orleanian John Pope. Collected here are not just simple, mindless recitations of schools and workplaces, marriages, and mourners bereft. These pieces in Getting Off at Elysian Fields: Obituaries from the New Orleans "Times-Picayune" are full-blooded life stories with accounts of great achievements, dubious dabblings, unavoidable foibles, relationships gone sour, and happenstances that turn out to be life-changing.

To be sure, there are stories about Carnival monarchs, great philanthropists, and a few politicians. But because New Orleans embraces eccentric behavior, there are stories of people who colored way outside the lines. For instance, there was the doctor who used his plasma to make his flowers grow, and the philanthropist who took money she had put aside for a fur coat to underwrite the lawsuit that desegregated Tulane University. A letter carrier everyone loved turned out to have been a spy during World War II, and a fledgling lawyer changed his lifelong thoughts about race when he saw blind people going into a Christmas party through separate doors--one for white people and another for African Americans. Then there was the punctilious judge who got down on his hands and knees to edge his lawn--with scissors.

Because New Orleans funerals are distinctive, the author includes accounts of four that he covered, complete with soulful singing and even some dancing. As a popular, local bumper sticker indisputably declares, "New Orleans--We Put the Fun in Funeral."