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Louisiana Voyages: The Travel Writings of Catharine Cole
Books: Travel: Acadian: Item 3
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Louisiana Voyages: The Travel Writings of Catharine Coleby Martha R. Field, Joan B. Mclaughlin, and Jack McLaughlin
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From Publishers Weekly
Writing under the pseudonym Catharine Cole, newspaper reporter Field undertook a series of trips through Louisiana parishes in the late 19th century for the New Orleans Daily Picayune. Her travels to remote areas frequently included unsafe modes of transportation, emergency farmhouse stayovers and strange foodstuffs; one essay relates an 1891 ferry ride across the Atchafalaya River aboard an unstable flatboat: "One of the horses screamed. I could see his white eyeball glaring. I said, almost involuntarily, an abject, cowardly kind of prayer, and wished I hadn't my best black dress on." But even when Cole's buggy is stuck in mud, her love for Louisiana shines through. Cole's affection for Louisiana's landscape and back roads is especially poignant post-Katrina. Although the areas hardest hit by that storm aren't depicted, Cole's writing demonstrates how Louisianians felt then about their homes, and there's a sense that little of that passion has waned in the past century. In the introduction, the editors (both retired Clemson University professors) note that Cole became a celebrity journalist through these literary sketches; it's easy to see why, given her ability to illuminate the "soil, scenery, and life" of each parish. (Mar.)
Copyright © Reed business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.
From Booklist
Under the pseudonym Catharine Cole, Field wrote articles in the late nineteenth century for the New Orleans Daily Picayune. She was well known for her travel pieces, especially her chronicles of a series of trips she made around Louisiana in 1891 and 1892. Now a selection of these pieces has been culled from the yellowed pages of that newspaper and collected here, and for contemporary readers, they present a graphic and often lovely evocation of the state of the state back then. Modes of travel lacked the comfort and convenience we know today, and Field traveled alone--unusual for the time and for her gender. From the elegant, socially conscious town of Natchitoches to the beautiful Grand Isle in the Gulf to her hometown of New Orleans, where "every house suggests a romance, every shop a carnival," she paints vibrant pictures of life as it once was and, in many ways, still is. With hurricane destruction on our minds these days, it is good to see preservation of such timeless prose. Brad Hooper
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.
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