After fifteen years of living like a vagabond on her reporter's schedule, Julia Reed got married and bought a house in the historic Garden District. Four weeks after she moved in, Hurricane Katrina struck. The House on First Street is the chronicle of Reed's remarkable and often hilarious homecoming, as well as a thoroughly original tribute to our country's most original city.
Review
βReed is a breezy writer who nicely captures the despair and elation of seeing the city slowly come back to life.β (Chicago Sun-Times )
βWhat emerges from a heartrending, soul-stirring, rib-tickling and palate-prickling banquet of details is why Ms. Reed cannot leave New Orleans: love. Itβs an undeceived devotion to a place and particularity that is admirable, and almost astonishing, in our increasingly deracinated culture.β (Wall Street Journal )
βReed shares this sliver of her life with a light, conversational tone, and though somewhat tangential, she conveys the richness of pace and flavor of the Big Easy as life gets back to βnormalβ without pretense.β (Christian Science Monitor )
β β¦ Reed recounts with humor those and other home-improvement nightmares in a story that is part βMoney Pittβ and part love letter to her adopted home town.β (Washington Post, Front Page Feature )
βReed will enthrall you with the Big Easy spirit of rebuilding, determination, and great eats along the way.β (Madison County Herald )
βJulia Reed knows how to live. She also knows how best to write about it in hilarious, sensual and mouthwatering detail....This book is so poignant and delicious, you may want to eat it instead of read it.β (Adriana Trigiani, bestselling author of the Big Stone Gap series and Lucia, Lucia )
βIn The House on First Street, Julia Reed, one of the cleverest crafters of prose writing today, tackles the countryβs most fascinating and frustrating city....With her usual keen eye for the quirky and outrageous, Reed finds much to amuse the reader in this delightful volume.β (Cokie Roberts, ABC and NPR News, author of LADIES OF LIBERTY )
βWow! This is the most brilliant and delightful memoir to come out of post-Katrina New Orleans. With great literary panache and a throaty humor, Julia Reed captures the magical allure of the city, its food and its people...destined to be a classic.β (Walter Issacson, bestselling author of Einstein and Benjamin Franklin. )
About the Author
Julia Reed grew up in Greenville, Mississippi. She is a contributing editor at Newsweek and is the author of the essay collection Queen of the Turtle Derby. She lives in New Orleans.