Bayou Farewell : The Rich Life and Tragic Death of Louisiana's Cajun Coast

by Mike Tidwell

Release Date: 09 March, 2004

Edition: Paperback

Price:

More Info

Excellent Service

Excellent service and response. Book arrived exactly as described in the time period that was promised. Thanks for the good service.

Review from Louisiana Sportsman magazine

A Washington, D.C., area resident, Tidwell came to Louisiana to write a story for the Washington Post about hitch-hiking on Cajun Country shrimp boats.

But what he found was the greatest untold story in America, one about which he and his associates had never heard a single word ' the death of the Louisiana coast. ...Tidwell came in with no preconceived ideas about the environmental disaster along the Louisiana coast.

The marsh, however, grabbed him with her cord-grass fingers, and pulled him into herself. She showed him her blanched oak skeletons that stand defiant and scream like sentinels, her deeply dredged canals that fester like scars on the skin of an old mother, and her beaches that are being stripped of their load with the efficiency of a thousand miners.

The marsh cried for Tidwell ' an outsider ' to be her voice, and he's answered the call.

Bayou Farewell is an amazing book. Actually, amazing isn't adequately superlative. It's an astounding book that ought to be required reading in every high school in Louisiana, if not the nation.

It was a book only a non-Louisianian could have written, and Tidwell, with his mastery of the English language and breathtakingly descriptive prose, was perfect for the task. The marsh ' the mother of our Louisiana culture ' knew what she was doing, even in this hour as she lay on her death bed.

And she is, indeed, on her death bed.

The author brings the coastal erosion disaster to a national audience by giving it life through the words and actions of the people who live in the marshes and watch helplessly as the Gulf day by day nibbles its way toward their homes.