Mardi Gras: Chronicles of the New Orleans Carnival
In a city with its origins in Europe's Catholic nations, queens and fools, gods and demons reign from Twelfth Night to Ash Wednesday. New Orleans is transformed into a surreal world during Carnival season. The past and present parade side by side down boulevards and through side streets.  Take a tour with a Carnival historian who has studied Mardi Gras from New Orleans to around the globe. The elaborate and eventful stories of royal institutions, superkrewes, and neighborhood groups are narrated here. Featured are personal stories of the larger-than-life individuals who made Carnival what it is today.  Fascinating and intimate, this riotous exploration is a rare glimpse into the history of all-but-forgotten traditions and modern customs. Food, floats, and families are featured in this colorfully photographed volume. Historical pictures, anecdotes, recipes, characters, and flavor fill every page. Kings and balls, societies and myths are all evocatively examined.  Today's revelries and bygone times are engagingly presented in this homage to the joie de vivre of the Carnival season. This rich, vibrant book is a necessary addition to every Mardi Gras lover's collection. Errol Laborde, editor and publisher of New Orleans magazine and Louisiana Life magazine, has won more than twenty-five New Orleans Press Club awards for outstanding journalism and the National City and Regional Magazine Association Award for his New Orleans magazine Streetcar column. A producer and panelist on award-winning public-television program Informed Sources, Laborde is the founding president and a board member of the Tennessee Williams/New Orleans Literary Festival. He is the author of I Never Danced with an Eggplant (On a Streetcar Before): Chronicles of Life and Adventures in New Orleans, published by Pelican. Mitchel L. Osborne has published books, guides, and calendars on New Orleans and Mardi Gras and was the official 1984 World's Fair publisher for the Louisiana World Exposition in New Orleans. He has worked in such varied places as the Pacific Northwest and the Australian outback. He resides near the Puget Sound in Washington. Peggy Scott Laborde has earned Press Club of New Orleans and American Women in Radio and Television awards and has been praised for her local arts and history conservation efforts. She is the producer and host of the public television program Steppin' Out. Laborde is the coauthor of Pelican's Lost Restaurants of New Orleans, Canal Street: New Orleans' Great Wide Way, and Christmas in New Orleans and the foreword writer of Étouffée Mon Amour: The Great Restaurants of New Orleans.