Unfathomable city A New Orleans atlas

My first landlord in New Orleans, a Tennessee native who had lived in New York and Washington, told me that after a few years in the financial and political capitals, he understood them. But after a decade in this sweltering city, with its 18th-century fusion cuisine, misplaced Massapequa-on-the-Mississippi accent and transvestite rap divas, he was "still just peeling back the layers." In the second volume of her planned trilogy of deliciously eccentric atlases, Solnit, the Left Coast polymath, amasses a team led by Snedeker, a New Orleans filmmaker, to plumb the Crescent City's admittedly "unfathomable" depths. As cultured New Orleanians know (or at least pretend to), the word essay comes from the French essayer (to attempt); the book's most rewarding essays are not its most successful attempts but its most audacious. Is it a single civic psychosis that led Louisiana to construct the world's largest pumping station and the nation's largest prison in costly, fruitless attempts to solve New Orleans's notorious flooding and crime problems? Perhaps. Do local cravings for raw oysters and raunchy sex share a root? Maybe. Regardless, this objet d'art is as infectious as a second line, an urban art form that the scholar-parader Joel (Heavy D) Dinerstein points out is named for its audience participants instead of its leaders. With "Unfathomable City," Solnit and Snedeker have produced an idiosyncratic, luminous tribute to the greatest human creation defined by its audience participants: the city itself.

New York City's vitality and diversity are done justice in this third in a series of city atlases, following Unfathomable City: A New Orleans Atlas and Infinite City: A San Francisco Atlas. As editor Solnit states in her introduction to the present volume, her trilogy explores "what maps can do to describe the ingredients and systems that make up a city and what stories remain to be told after we think we know where we are." The book includes 26 wonderfully inventive maps, presented in color on full pages and accompanied by essays by a variety of contributors, including historians, ethnographers, journalists, and novelists. The maps are often playful and idiosyncratic. Highlights include "Harper's and Harpooners: Whaling and Publishing in Melville's Manhattan," "Mysterious Land of Shaolin: The Wu-Tang Clan's Staten Island," and a map entitled "City of Women," which superimposes the names of women over stations on a subway map. Even lifelong New Yorkers fluent in their city's history will find this work thought-provoking. Color illus. (Oct.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.