Source: Booklist

Readers interested in books with a New Orleans twist might find these worth looking for. All reviews are excerpted from Booklsit:

Moving to Higher Ground: How Jazz Can Change Your Life by Wynton Marsalis and Geoffrey C. Ward: He [Marsalis] does several worthwhile things—defining swing, explaining the musical language of jazz, realizing the blues as the American apotheosis of a universal expressive mode, describing the sensations of learning to play and keeping on playing, and hailing a baker’s dozen of great jazz artists—with more feeling than most jazz critics. More, he explains the cutting remarks he spouted as a young turk that have haunted him since and winningly reformulates the naive old wish for jazz to be a force of world reconciliation. What a honey of a book.

Not Just the Levees Broke: My Story during and after Hurricane Katrina by Phyllis Montana Leblanc: Leblanc recalls, in very human flashes of selfishness, not wanting her more altruistic husband to risk his life helping others. She, a more reluctant hero, plotted to punish political figures she held responsible, as she struggled along atop the levee, overcoming her own fears to help strangers and try not to judge those who took advantage. All the while, Leblanc wondered about the politics of the city and the nation that would allow such a tragedy.

City of Refuge by Tom Piazza: In the pre-storm chapters, the conflicts and dreams of Piazza’s characters, men and women of bedrock goodness, define home, revealing all that Katrina will disrupt and destroy. Then, in unforgettable scenes of biblical consequence, Piazza dramatizes more devastatingly than any journalistic account the hurricane’s shocking aftermath, aligning the failure to protect, rescue, and respect the people of the Lower Ninth with the sweeping brutality of war. By following his characters into the Katrina diaspora and back again, Piazza tells a towering tale of self, family, and place, a story as old and heartbreaking as humankind itself.

Note that Piazza's book is a novel - the first to come out on the storm and flood that followed.