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North America
Here are some of our favorite guides and literature on North America (USA and Canada) that we have previously featured on our home page.

Do You Know What It Means to Miss New Orleans? ( Chin Music Press, $18.50) Part history, part anecdote, part cookbook, Do You Know… is itself a historic document about New Orleans. The first section of the book, on Hurricane Katrina, has writers discussing how they lived through the storm and its aftermath. Jason Berry drinks, cuts up fallen trees and curses George W. Bush; Bill Lavender walks across New Orleans through the rising water in search of a way out of town. The second half of the book is a collection of people’s stories about life in New Orleans. C. W. Cannon’s 2003 Mardi Gras manifest is an anti-Puritanical, pro-public space tract celebrating New Orleans. There are recipes for red beans and rice and a story about a trapeze artist. Punctuating it all are 19th century lithographs of the city as well as quotes by the likes of Mark Twain; Sister Madeleine Hachard, an 18th century nun; Mayor Ray Nagin; Dennis Kucinich and Barbara Bush among others. This is a well-designed book brought to you by the press that published Kuhaku. - ADD TO CART	Mexican Calendar Girls Angela Villalba ( Chronicle Books, $19.95) This entertaining book contains a selection of vintage images from Mexican calendars, much like the ones we give away after Thanksgiving. The pictures have a classic kitschy retro feel, with vivid colors and vibrant girls evoking a long gone era that perhaps never was. The introduction, in both English and Spanish, includes a history of the calendars from the original painters to the more modern printers. This book covers a full range of cultural icons, such as revolutionary women, sexy girls, and mythic heroines. - ADD TO CART
Down in New Orleans: Reflections from a Drowned City Billy Sothern ( University of California Press, $21.95) New Orleans post-Hurricane Katrina titles have carved out a big space on the shelves of bookstores in New Orleans. Some titles that came out just before the storm, like Rob Walker's Letters from New Orleans and the first four books of the Neighborhood Storybook Project are still relevant by showing aspects of the city that are now gone forever. In Down in New Orleans, Billy Sothern starts a tale of his own evacuation to Mississippi, before adding layer after layer of (hi)stories. Between accounts of his exile and return to a damaged home, Sothern tells us about a local hero who rescued trapped residents in his boat before being arrested as a terrorism suspect and held by police for over a month; the journey of residents trying to escape the rising waters by walking across the Crescent City Connection bridge into neighboring Jefferson Parish only to be turned back at gunpoint by local police; and the fate of the cities most vulnerable populations, including prison inmates abandoned in flooded cells by fleeing police. Underpinning these stories are the workings of history, race, and poverty in the city that made the breeches and the resulting crises not just visible, but inevitable. - ADD TO CART	All Summer Long Brian Chidester ( Dumb Angel, $19.95) An offbeat but librarian-like look into the early 60s surf culture that swept Southern California from goofy beach movies to bohemian surf zines. These kids are really into this mod-surf aesthetic, from weird thrift store cash-in classical LPs with hipster surfer girls on the cover to the clean spaceship lines of Googie designed drive-ins. It’s funny seeing this world through the eyes of modern day hipsters. They transform the 60s Californian beach side suburbs into utopian futuristic dream scapes. There’s an extensive Beach Boys rock family tree too for Pet Sounds freaks. - ADD TO CART
Oddball Iowa: A Guide to Some Really Strange Places Jerome Pohlen ( Chicago Review Press, $14.95) We’ve been following Jerome Pohlen’s survey of strange Americana ever since we carried his “Cool Spots” ‘zine in the 1990s. Like his seven other books (Illinois, Indiana, Wisconsin, Colorado, Florida, Ohio and Minnesota), Oddball Iowa points out weird roadside attractions (see Iowa’s only tunnel). It also indicates where (in)famous events occurred (see Bonnie and Clyde-ambushed!; and, Cary Grant’s death site). And, as always, Pohlen finds the local folk-artists. - ADD TO CART	A Journey into the Transcendentalists’ New England R. Todd Felton ( Roaring Forties Press, $19.95) This is an intriguing addition to the ever growing genre of literary guidebooks. It comes as part of a new series that includes Dorothy Parker’s New York and Steinbeck’s California. This particular volume is an exploration of the lives and geographies of the 19th century Transcendentalist movement. Different New England literary and cultural landmarks are highlighted in the context of the ideas and intellectual activity that occurred there. The chapter on the commune Brook Farm is particularly absorbing. This 19th century attempt at a ‘back to the land’ lifestyle fitted in with the Transcendentalists’ spiritual and somewhat mythic ideas of the human connection to the earth. The movement failed for many of the same reasons the hippy communes did: the inability of people to share the workload and truly co-operate with each other, and the difficult balance between the hard labor that farm work requires and the space needed to write and create. It is incredibly inspiring reading about prior attempts at creating imagined or intellectual idylls and ‘actual’ egalitarian utopias, especially in the context of the current political climate. “There are new lands, new men, new thoughts. Let us demand our own works and laws and worship.” (Emerson). I imagine that traveling with this book would infuse the places mentioned within with meaning that you just wouldn’t get from reading a mere commemorative plaque. - ADD TO CART
Assassination Vacation Sarah Vowell ( Simon and Schuster, $14.00) You may already be familiar with Sarah Vowell's voice from her frequent appearances on NPR's This American Life or perhaps from her sulky turn as the voice of Violet, the moody teenager in The Incredibles. Assassination Vacation reads like a nerdy hipster's on-the-road guide to the landmarks of the first three presidential assassinations. Her writing voice is at once hip and geeky. She is unashamedly enthusiastic about the obscurities of history but somehow manages to imbue her visits to random commemorative plaques and recreated drawing rooms with a typical McSweeney's-esque detached and idiosyncratic wit. - ADD TO CART	Five Flights Up and Other New York Apartment Stories Toni Schlesinger ( Princeton Architectural Press, $24.95) This collection of interviews, culled from Toni Schlesinger’s ‘Shelter’ column in The Village Voice, evokes a now mythical pre-Giuliani New York. The different characters that emerge from the interviews create a vivid picture of the storied ancient immigrant communities of the great boroughs alongside the reckless abandon-all-ye-hope feel of warehouse living in 1970s downtown Manhattan. Schlesinger’s voice is charming and chatty yet somehow incisive and arch. This is the kind of book that you can open on any page and be drawn into another person’s world, from a JD Salinger short-story-like Upper East Side existence to the Iranian painter and her husband who live in separate apartments so they can both have studios. A fascinating glimpse into the lives of New Yorkers, from pompous Chelsea loft dwellers and retired longshoremen who have transformed their habitats and have in turn been transformed by the city in which they have chosen to live. - ADD TO CART

The Bottom of the Harbor
Joseph Mitchell
( Pantheon, hardback, $24.00)

These days, virtually all travel literature has an underlying current of what might be called anticipatory nostalgia: the nagging awareness that whatever the author describes is about to be blown away by the gale winds of cultural globalization. This was not the case 50 years ago when Joseph Mitchell wrote these pieces about the New York harbor. The harbor seemed immutable; after all wasn't the city built around it? Yet Mitchell wrote as if he was trying to hold and preserve something precious, and now that the way of life he recorded has vanished, it is clear that he succeeded. He was particularly attracted to the people who worked the harbor, their skills, their tools, their superstitions, and especially their talk. Mitchell was a world-class listener. In one essay, he walks through the cemetery of a community of freed slaves who settled as oystermen on Staten Island, along with one of the last survivors, whose memories of the people under the headstones stretch back to the 19th century. This collection is a must-read for any lover of New York, of great writing, or both.
- ADD TO CART