They Called Us River Rats
The Last Batture Settlement of New Orleans
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They Called Us River Rats
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Narrated by:
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Adam Barr
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By:
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Macon Fry
About this listen
They Called Us River Rats: The Last Batture Settlement of New Orleans is the previously untold story of perhaps the oldest outsider settlement in America, an invisible community on the annually flooded shores of the Mississippi River. This community exists in the place between the normal high and low water line of the Mississippi River, a zone known in Louisiana as the batture.
Until now, the stories of this way of life have existed only in the memories of those who have lived here. They Called Us River Rats also explores the troubled relationship between people inside the levees, the often-reviled batture folks, and the river itself. It traces the struggle between batture folks and city authorities, the commercial interests that claimed the river, and Louisiana's most powerful politicians.
Today Fry is among the senior generation of "River Rats" living in a vestigial colony of 12 "camps" on New Orleans' river batture, a fragment of a settlement that once stretched nearly six miles and numbered hundreds of homes. It is the last riparian settlement on the Lower Mississippi and a contrarian, independent life outside urban zoning, planning, and flood protection. This book is for everyone who ever felt the pull of the Mississippi River or saw its towering levees and wondered who could live on the other side.
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-
Story5 out of 5 stars 185
Fifty years after the Atlantic slave trade was outlawed, the Clotilda became the last ship in history to bring enslaved Africans to the United States. The ship was scuttled and burned on arrival to hide the wealthy perpetrators to escape prosecution. Despite numerous efforts to find the sunken wreck, Clotilda remained hidden for the next 160 years. But in 2019, journalist Ben Raines made international news when he successfully concluded his obsessive quest through the swamps of Alabama to uncover one of our nation’s most important historical artifacts.
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5 out of 5 stars
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Wow. Just Wow.
- By Pinkhippiechick on 02-11-22
By: Ben Raines
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The Gulf
- The Making of an American Sea
- By: Jack E. Davis
- Narrated by: Tom Perkins
- Length: 20 hrs and 45 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 427
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 369
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 370
When painter Winslow Homer first sailed into the Gulf of Mexico, he was struck by its "special kind of providence." Indeed, the Gulf presented itself as America's sea - bound by geography, culture, and tradition to the national experience - and yet, there has never been a comprehensive history of the Gulf until now. And so, in this rich and original work that explores the Gulf through our human connection with the sea, environmental historian Jack E. Davis finally places this exceptional region into the American mythos in a sweeping history that extends from the Pleistocene age to the 21st century.
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1 out of 5 stars
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Decolonize gulf history
- By Jesse Carr on 05-02-18
By: Jack E. Davis
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The Good Rain
- Across Time and Terrain in the Pacific Northwest
- By: Timothy Egan
- Narrated by: Grover Gardner
- Length: 12 hrs and 12 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 186
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 165
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 165
A fantastic book! Timothy Egan describes his journeys in the Pacific Northwest through visits to salmon fisheries, redwood forests and the manicured English gardens of Vancouver. Here is a blend of history, anthropology and politics.
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5 out of 5 stars
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White man bad, capitalism bad
- By Forget about it on 04-15-21
By: Timothy Egan
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The Johnstown Flood
- By: David McCullough
- Narrated by: Edward Herrmann
- Length: 9 hrs and 3 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 4,148
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 3,308
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 3,289
At the end of the last century, Johnstown, Pennsylvania, was a booming coal-and-steel town filled with hardworking families striving for a piece of the nation's burgeoning industrial prosperity. In the mountains above Johnstown, an old earth dam had been hastily rebuilt to create a lake for an exclusive summer resort patronized by the tycoons of that same industrial prosperity, among them Andrew Carnegie, Henry Clay Frick, and Andrew Mellon.
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5 out of 5 stars
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A page-turner! HIstory that reads like a novel
- By Susan K Donley on 06-17-05
By: David McCullough
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Ruthless Tide
- The Heroes and Villains of the Johnstown Flood, America’s Astonishing Gilded Age Disaster
- By: Al Roker
- Narrated by: Mirron Willis
- Length: 8 hrs and 27 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 78
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 71
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 71
A gripping narrative history of the 1889 Johnstown Flood - the deadliest flood in US history - from New York Times best-selling author, NBC host, and legendary weather authority Al Roker. May 1889: After a deluge of rainfall swelled the Little Conemaugh River, panicked engineers watched helplessly as swiftly rising waters threatened to breach the South Fork Dam in central Pennsylvania. Though they telegraphed neighboring towns, warning of the impending danger, residents, used to false alarms, remained in their homes. At 3:10 p.m., the dam gave way....
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5 out of 5 stars
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Mispronunciation bothers me
- By Tracy on 09-08-18
By: Al Roker
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Northland
- A 4,000-Mile Journey Along America's Forgotten Border
- By: Porter Fox
- Narrated by: Jonathan Yen
- Length: 9 hrs and 9 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4 out of 5 stars 103
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Performance4 out of 5 stars 87
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Story4 out of 5 stars 87
America's northern border is the world's longest international boundary, yet it remains obscure even to Americans. Travel writer Porter Fox spent two years exploring its length by canoe, freighter, and car - and in Northland, he delivers the little-known history of the region and a riveting account of his travels. Fox follows explorer Samuel de Champlain's adventures; recounts the rise and fall of the iron, wheat, and timber industries; crosses the Great Lakes on a freighter; and tracks America's fur traders through the Boundary Waters.
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5 out of 5 stars
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Great listen - great narrator
- By Jonathan on 01-10-19
By: Porter Fox
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The King of California
- J.G. Boswell and the Making of a Secret American Empire
- By: Mark Arax, Rick Wartzman
- Narrated by: James Patrick Cronin
- Length: 19 hrs and 29 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 167
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 139
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 141
J. G. Boswell was the biggest farmer in America. He built a secret empire while thumbing his nose at nature, politicians, labor unions, and every journalist who ever tried to lift the veil on the ultimate "factory in the fields". The King of California is the previously untold account of how a Georgia slave-owning family migrated to California in the early 1920s, drained one of America 's biggest lakes in an act of incredible hubris and carved out the richest cotton empire in the world.
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5 out of 5 stars
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Interesting story of California Ag history
- By Jean on 08-11-14
By: Mark Arax, and others
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The Great Quake
- How the Biggest Earthquake in North America Changed Our Understanding of the Planet
- By: Henry Fountain
- Narrated by: Robert Fass
- Length: 9 hrs and 2 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 249
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 217
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 216
A riveting narrative about the biggest earthquake in North American recorded history - the 1964 Alaska earthquake that demolished the city of Valdez and swept away the island village of Chenega - and the geologist who hunted for clues to explain how and why it took place.
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5 out of 5 stars
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Fascinating to hear the full story
- By Debby A Davis on 08-18-17
By: Henry Fountain
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The Great Hurricane
- 1938
- By: Cherie Burns
- Narrated by: Anna Fields
- Length: 5 hrs and 49 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 565
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 391
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 389
On the night of September 20, 1938, the news on the radio was full of Hitler's pending invasion of Czechoslovakia. Severe weather wasn't mentioned; only light rain was forecast for the following day. In a matter of hours, however, a hurricane of unprecedented force would tear through one of the wealthiest and most populated stretches of coastline in America, obliterating communities from Long Island to Providence, destroying entire fishing fleets from Montauk to Narragansett Bay.
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4 out of 5 stars
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Mesmerizing book!
- By Tracey on 04-23-13
By: Cherie Burns
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The Longest Road
- Overland in Search of America, from Key West to the Arctic Ocean
- By: Philip Caputo
- Narrated by: Pete Larkin
- Length: 11 hrs and 50 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4 out of 5 stars 122
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Performance4 out of 5 stars 108
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Story4 out of 5 stars 107
Philip Caputo, who had just turned 70, his wife, and their two English setters took off in a truck hauling an Airstream camper from Key West, Florida, en route via back roads and state routes to Deadhorse, Alaska. The journey took four months and covered 17,000 miles, during which Caputo interviewed more than 80 Americans from all walks of life to get a picture of what their lives and the life of the nation are really about in the 21st century.
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1 out of 5 stars
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Very Disappointing
- By Amazon Customer on 03-25-18
By: Philip Caputo
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Last Train to Paradise
- Henry Flagler and the Spectacular Rise and Fall of the Railroad That Crossed an Ocean
- By: Les Standiford
- Narrated by: Del Roy
- Length: 8 hrs and 14 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 584
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 468
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 469
The paths of the great American robber barons were paved with riches, and though ordinary citizens paid for them, they also profited. Les Standiford, author of the John Deal thrillers, tells how the man who turned Florida's swamps into the playgrounds of the rich performed the almost superhuman feat of building a railroad from the mainland to Key West at the turn of the century.
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4 out of 5 stars
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A Pleasant Surprise
- By Roy on 04-05-09
By: Les Standiford
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Sudden Sea
- By: R.A. Scotti
- Narrated by: L. J. Ganser
- Length: 7 hrs and 6 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 71
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 60
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 60
In the tradition of The Perfect Storm, Sudden Sea hearkens back to a natural disaster that struck terror in the hearts of many. In this narrative, listeners experience the Great Hurricane of 1938, the most financially destructive storm on record.
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5 out of 5 stars
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Very professional and interesting
- By Careful Consumer on 08-09-23
By: R.A. Scotti
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The Storm of the Century
- Tragedy, Heroism, Survival, and the Epic True Story of America's Deadliest Natural Disaster: The Great Gulf Hurricane of 1900
- By: Al Roker, William Hogeland
- Narrated by: Byron Wagner
- Length: 8 hrs and 6 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 179
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 164
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 164
On the afternoon of September 8, 1900, 200-mile-per-hour winds and 15-foot waves slammed into Galveston, the prosperous and growing port city on Texas' Gulf Coast. By dawn the next day, when the storm had passed, the city that had existed just hours before was gone. Shattered, grief-stricken survivors emerged to witness a level of destruction never before seen: 8,000 corpses littered the streets and were buried under the massive wreckage.
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5 out of 5 stars
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Review of "The Storm of the Century "
- By S. Noe on 09-04-15
By: Al Roker, and others
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Visit Sunny Chernobyl
- And Other Adventures in the World's Most Polluted Places
- By: Andrew Blackwell
- Narrated by: Ax Norman
- Length: 10 hrs and 26 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4 out of 5 stars 91
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Performance4 out of 5 stars 79
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Story4 out of 5 stars 78
For most of us, traveling means visiting the most beautiful places on Earth - Paris, the Taj Mahal, the Grand Canyon. It’s rare to book a plane ticket to visit the lifeless moonscape of Canada’s oil sand strip mines, or to seek out the Chinese city of Linfen, legendary as the most polluted in the world. But in Visit Sunny Chernobyl, Andrew Blackwell embraces a different kind of travel, taking a jaunt through the most gruesomely polluted places on Earth.
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4 out of 5 stars
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Better than I predicted
- By Paul Luthi on 08-23-13
By: Andrew Blackwell
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Wicked River
- The Mississippi When It Last Ran Wild
- By: Lee Sandlin Jeff
- Narrated by: Jeff McCarthy
- Length: 10 hrs and 9 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 134
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 111
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 112
Acclaimed journalist and author Lee Sandlin delivers a riveting glimpse of a dangerous and colorful place in America’s historical landscape - the Mississippi River of the 19th century. Long before it was dredged into a shipping channel or romanticized into myth, the untamed Mississippi - the lifeblood of communities that rose and fell along its banks - spawned a motley array of pirates and dignitaries, visionaries, and thieves.
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4 out of 5 stars
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Worth a listen
- By Robert B. Golson on 12-09-10
By: Lee Sandlin Jeff
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The Worst Hard Time
- The Untold Story of Those Who Survived the Great American Dust Bowl
- By: Timothy Egan
- Narrated by: Jacob York
- Length: 12 hrs and 57 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 223
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Performance5 out of 5 stars 195
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 195
The dust storms that terrorized the High Plains in the darkest years of the Depression were like nothing ever seen before or since. Following a dozen families and their communities through the rise and fall of the region, Timothy Egan tells of their desperate attempts to carry on through blinding black dust blizzards, crop failure, and the death of loved ones. Brilliantly capturing the terrifying drama of catastrophe, he does equal justice to the human characters who become his heroes.
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2 out of 5 stars
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Excellent history ruined by Egan's bias & cynicism
- By Nathan on 03-21-23
By: Timothy Egan
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Grandma Gatewood's Walk
- The Inspiring Story of the Woman Who Saved the Appalachian Trail
- By: Ben Montgomery
- Narrated by: Patrick Lawlor
- Length: 7 hrs and 54 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 2,595
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 2,271
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 2,261
Emma Gatewood told her family she was going on a walk and left her small Ohio hometown with a change of clothes and less than $200. The next anybody heard from her, this genteel, farm-reared, 67-year-old great-grandmother had walked 800 miles along the 2,050-mile Appalachian Trail. And in September 1955, atop Maine's Mount Katahdin, she sang the first verse of "America, the Beautiful" and proclaimed, "I said I'll do it, and I've done it."
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4 out of 5 stars
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Inspiring story about a strong amazing woman
- By David Shear on 12-22-14
By: Ben Montgomery
What listeners say about They Called Us River Rats
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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Overall5 out of 5 stars
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Performance3 out of 5 stars
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Story5 out of 5 stars
- Shannon
- 08-12-22
great story and complex understanding of NOLA
great story and research is excellent
only fault, have a narrator qho.knows how to correctly pronounce local names, streets and districts
very good insight to local river scene along the batture
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Overall5 out of 5 stars
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Performance5 out of 5 stars
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Story5 out of 5 stars
- L. Marino
- 07-25-24
Passionate, engaging, and informative
Mr. Fry is a fascinating cat! This homage to batture life and history is truly engaging. Some of that history is sordid, though more (but not entirely) on the part of others than the batture-dwellers; some is heroic or just plain fun, in a Huck Finn kind of way; and generally it all rings true. Mr. Fry has glossed over some legitimate concerns of the levee districts and the Corps for protection of the levees, but I think out of passion rather than malice. This is a great book for anyone who lives in or knows or simply cares about New Orleans - and helpful to understanding why things are the way they are today in this unique city. Bissot’s successors are, as I write this, trying to create a development on Bissot-claimed property on the flood side of the levee - the irony of this is overwhelming, given what you will learn in this book. The narrator did a great job, and even pronounced almost everything correctly, which as any New Orleanian knows is no mean trick!
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Overall5 out of 5 stars
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Performance4 out of 5 stars
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Story5 out of 5 stars
- Cathy C
- 03-27-23
Enjoyable and interesting nonfiction
Great story about living on the batture in New Orleans now and back in time. Well written, well researched. Narrator was good but he mispronounced many words known to locals which was a shame. Otherwise, a great read.
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