Listed in the front of this book are an editor, graphic designer, and cover illustrator. There is no author mentioned. This book was sort of a let down. I was hoping to find interesting things about Louisiana that I didn’t previously know, and where there might have been the occasional detail I was just unsure about, there was nothing very intriguing about the book. This might be a good book for students that live in other states to have an idea of what a few things are like in Louisiana, but it does little to help teach those that live here about the history and relevancy certain things in Louisiana have to their lives.
The organization of the book is enumeration, and there are a lot of stock photo-type pictures throughout the book that show very generic representations of aspects of life in Louisiana. There is a quick facts section at the beginning of the book that lists details of the state such as state bird, population, state tree, largest city, motto, etc.
I did not like this book for various reasons. Included in these reasons are the shallowness of information that is presented in the book. There were very elementary descriptions of climate and plants and animals, etc. that did nothing to spur any interest in anything related to Louisiana. One such example is about halfway through the book in the section titled, “Plants and Animals,” there is a picture of a cypress tree in the middle of a swamp and the tree has moss hanging from the branches. The caption underneath the photo says, “Spanish moss hangs from cypress trees in Louisiana’s Atchafalaya National Wildlife Refuge.” This does nothing but state the obvious of what you are looking at in the picture. It tells nothing of what Spanish moss is, what causes it, or the fact that it is very wide spread throughout the area. Not to mention the fact that its growth is starting to dwindle because of the urbanization taking place throughout the state.
I would not recommend this book to anyone other than maybe someone that knows nothing about Louisiana and doesn’t really care to know very much about it at the end of the day. It is more like a caricature of the state than an actual informative piece meant for further reading and investigation.