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The Good Pirates of the Forgotten Bayous: Fighting to Save a Way of Life in the Wake of Hurricane Katrina | 
 enlarge | Author: Ken Wells
Publisher: Yale University Press
Category: Book
List Price: $25.00
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Avg. Customer Rating:  3 reviews
Sales Rank: 21101
Media: Hardcover
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 272
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.3
Dimensions (in): 9.4 x 6.5 x 1.1
ISBN: 0300121520
Dewey Decimal Number: 976.336044092
EAN: 9780300121520
ASIN: 0300121520
Publication Date: September 2, 2008
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
Shipping: Expedited shipping available
Shipping: International shipping available
Condition: Brand New. 100% money back guarantee. All books shipped from Strand Bookstore, New York City, USA.
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Product Description
With a long and colorful family history of defying storms, the seafaring Robin cousins of St. Bernard Parish, Louisiana, make a fateful decision to ride out Hurricane Katrina on their hand-built fishing boats in a sheltered Civil War–era harbor called Violet Canal. But when Violet is overrun by killer surges, the Robins must summon all their courage, seamanship, and cunning to save themselves and the scores of others suddenly cast into their care. In this gripping saga, Louisiana native Ken Wells provides a close-up look at the harrowing experiences in the backwaters of New Orleans during and after Katrina. Focusing on the plight of the intrepid Robin family, whose members trace their local roots to before the American Revolution, Wells recounts the landfall of the storm and the tumultuous seventy-two hours afterward, when the Robins’ beloved bayou country lay catastrophically flooded and all but forgotten by outside authorities as the world focused its attention on New Orleans. Wells follows his characters for more than two years as they strive, amid mind-boggling wreckage and governmental fecklessness, to rebuild their shattered lives. This is a story about the deep longing for home and a proud bayou people’s love of the fertile but imperiled low country that has nourished them.
Book Description
The true story of a resilient circle of shrimp boat captains who faced and withstood the wreckage of Katrina but now find their courage tested by a greater threat: the disappearance of their livelihood and their centuries-old bayou culture.
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A "Must Read" September 25, 2008
Although I knew Ken Wells was a great writer after thoroughly enjoying his novels, this book was a completely different experience. It blew me away--although not literally, as happened to some of the people interviewed for this true account of hurricane Katrina in the parishes where the hurricane hit before New Orleans. The story was gripping, moving, and informative. Wells provides not only the riveting first person accounts of riding out the storm and the slow, subsequent recovery, but much useful background information about the culture of the area, as well as meteorological and political information about contributing causes of the disaster. I truly couldn't stop reading.
a great book by a great writer September 15, 2008
3 out of 3 found this review helpful
Ken Wells can write. Let me repeat this fact. Ken Wells can write. If you like the grittiness of Rick Bragg or the majesty of Hemingway's The Old Man and the Sea, you will like this book.
I am a reader, presumably readers of these reviews share this avocation. My greatest joy is what I call being "stopped" while reading a book. By this I mean reading a line so beautiful or thoughtful that I am actually stopped. I am forced to put down the book and let the words pour over me. Again and again Mr. Wells' prose stopped me.
Good Pirates is the story of courageous men and women fighting not only Hurricane Katrina, but for a way of life and a piece of America that most of their fellow countrymen do not even know exists. Wells, born and bred very near these bayous, knows these folks and their land in his soul --- and it shows.
The courage of good pirates like Ricky Robin and the drama of their fight against Hurricane Katrina and what is called modern progress is inspiring. The site of the battleground, essentially the same land where the Battle of New Orleans was fought in 1812, is the swampy end of America where Louisiana and the Gulf of Mexico occupy the same space. The land is described by Mr. Wells so beautifully that it is as breathtaking as the book's narrative of the struggle of man versus nature. The following excerpt is an example:
"Uplanders might find the greater landscape monotonous, the way a driver across Kansas might finally declare the endless canvas of golden wheat fields monochromatic. But bayou folk never tire of it., for they divine, in observations steeped in time, how these landscapes shift with the light and the tides and the seasons; how routinely they give up their wonders and their mysteries. Round the right bend in the summer twilight on the road to Delacroix Island and you might catch a bull alligator nosing out to feed, carving a V-shaped ripple on still waters painted by a dying sun. Or you can watch pelicans clowning above schools of cavorting porpoises not a half mile down from Ricky Robin's house, where the MR-GO meets sleepy Bayou La Loutre. Or you might drive the back road to Yscloskey in the fall and be startled by the sudden appearance of a marauding school of redfish in a placid lagoon that looks like it's been there for ten thousand years."
Mr. Wells has been a journalist for over thirty years, including stints at the Miami Herald and the Wall Street Journal. He has lived in Miami, San Francisco and London and now lives and works in the Manhattan area and works for a Conde Naste publication. However, this book proves that you can not take the bayou out of the boy.
Mr. Wells told Terry Gross on NPR's Fresh Air that the recognition that his life growing up on Bayou Black in Louisiana was markedly different than his fellow reporters came while working in his Wall Street Journal office. He realized that because of his bayou roots, he was probably the only person in the room that had ever skinned a possum. This epiphany led him to write his Faulkneresque Catahoula Bayou trilogy of life in south Louisiana
This saga of The Good Pirates of the Forgotten Bayous is compelling; but the real joy is experiencing the writing of Ken Wells.
This is a great book by a great writer, telling a most compelling and inspiring story of real people and a forgotten land.
"Damn, that SOB is coming up fast!" August 31, 2008
5 out of 5 found this review helpful
I've rarely read as gripping, horrifying, and inspiring a book as Ken Wells' story of what happened when The Storm hit the low-lying bayou parishes of St. Bernard and Plaquemines. As a reporter for the "Wall Street Journal," Wells, himself a Louisiana native, saw the devastation in the two parishes immediately after Katrina. His The Good Pirates of the Forgotten Bayous is an oral history of sorts of what happened to them, a story that got "forgotten" by a nation focused on New Orleans proper, and how the folks in the parish have fared since.
St Bernard and Plaquemines are shrimping parishes, and Wells' story focuses on the Robin clan, a shrimping family that's lived and worked in the area for over 200 years. Ricky Robin, captain of a 70 ton trawler called the "Lil Rick"--a ship built by hand--sails up the Violet Canal hoping to weather out the hurricane. But surges whipped up by the 140+ mph winds get him in trouble almost at once. In one of the book's most harrowing passages, Ricky remembers seeing a 20 foot skiff blowing through the air and then skidding across the roiling waves like a thrown stone.
In the three days following the worst of the storm, Ricky gives shelter on the "Lil Rick" to hundreds of homeless survivors, sometimes hammering out dixieland tunes on his trumpet to keep up their spirits. Disasters can bring out the worst in frightened and desperate people. But it brought out the very best in Ricky Robin.
Although Robin is the star of the book, Wells also introduces us to others who weathered the story-- such as Ricky's cousin Ronald Robin. Ronald, a veteran hurricane survivor, also tried to weather the storm in Violet Canal. But like so many others, he was stunned by Katrina's ferocity and swiftness. "Damn," he remembers exclaiming, "that SOB is coming up fast!"
Wells stayed in touch with the St. Bernard and Plaquemines survivors, and the second half of the book tells the story of how they've coped since the disaster. It's not been easy. The parishes are still pretty much devastated, and inhabitants are bitter--they call Katrina the "federal storm," convinced that the government could've prevented the greater part of the destruction had the levees been more carefully maintained. Ricky, for all his outward easy-going nature, suffers from flashbacks.
But at the end of the day, the story that Wells tells is one of astounding courage, human fellowship, and old-fashioned pluck. As Wells himself asserts, the story of the "good pirates" is "a narrative of the human spirit, a story about a decidedly blue-collar, ruggedly independent people whose decisions to face down Katrina lay in deep cultural anchors. It is a story of a people who--when they realize no one is coming to save them--rise up to save themselves and their neighbors in the face of raw peril and a disaster of unimaginable proportions."
Oh yeah: Wells is one heckuva writer too. Readers will be captivated by his style. Six stars.
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