This was in my opinion, the best book in the series. The setting is absolutely captivating and it makes the whole story take on an interesting, refreshing air. For me as a Christian, the part with the voodoo priestess was very thought provoking. The part also showed that Shiloh still had some major weaknesses and supports Cheney's later reasons for keeping her distance from him in the area of romance. The aunts were well-written, lovable and sometimes humorous characters. You won't want to miss the funny part later on in the book that invloves Shiloh and hairpins.

Great story:ghosts, mystery, romance. However, an interpreter would be nice. Or even a footnote translation.

This book introduces several new characters that you'll get to know as well as the main characters in the 4 previous books. It takes place at a Louisiana plantation owned by Cheney's great-aunts Marye and Elyse.

Aunt Elyse is sometimes absent-minded, but is funny and loveable. Aunt Marye, in contrast, seems overly strict, but deep down loves her visiting relatives and their friends. The lovestruck Chloe, a daughter of Aunt Elyse and Aunt Marye's butler and cook, chases after Shiloh so openly that I wanted to smack her, but she gets what she deserves in the end, especially when they discover she's helping the voodoo group trying to take over the plantation.

The book was very informative. This is a very complex and little-known breed. People need to be aware of what they are getting into when bringing a Catahoula into a suburban environment. This book was very helpful and straightforward. My Cindy is only 4 months old and is already exhibiting some of the traits pointed out by Mr. Abney. Consistency and persistence are very important when training this breed.

Finally, a book that discusses this wonderful dog. I adopted a stray dog 12 years ago. I did not know what kind of dog he was, but he was different from all the other dogs I have owned. My vet informed me that he is a Catahoula. He has been my companion ever since. I have been looking for someing more about this great breed and this book answered many questions about my dog, from why he has glass eyes to his need to please. My Catahoula was diagnosed with liver cancer recently, and has about six months left. If someone looked up the word "dog" in the dictionary, there should be a photo of a Catahoula. They are truly great dogs. Thanks for the great read!!

I recently adopted an 'unknown breed' dog from a no-kill shelter. While at the Grand Canyon last month, a tourist from Louisiana introduced himself, identified my dog as a Catahoula and gave an overview of the history...naturally I went home, checked the web, and confirmed his background. It has now become a hobby finding more and more information about this fantastic breed. Don Abney's book was a great foundation of knowledge for understanding our new family member and also having fascinating background history to tell my friends/family. All I could ask for is more pictures (color) and a list of reputable breeders/clubs...other than that I highly recommend this book! Thanks Don....

To capture the ironies, poignancies, and soulful idiosyncrasies of the grave sites pictured in this book, William Greiner spent several years traversing the cemeteries of New Orleans and South Louisiana....Despite Greiner's obvious debt to William Eggleston, who is often cited as the father of modern color photography, his photographs stand out as originals. The compositions are provocative, and he renders garish colors into a lushly seductive palette..... Mr. Greiner's small, Louisiana-style models of the barren earth combine with Thomas Lynch's elegant foreward to make The Reposed a fascinating book. Nov/Dec 1999

William Greiner's first monograph is a welcome selection of photographs from his many years of work in color. Greiner's view of the world, mainly in his native Louisiana, is alternately witty, tender and rhetorical. THE REPOSED is a book that the viewer will want to look at again and again.

-- Deborah Bell, Private Dealer of Photographs, New York City

If one picture is worth a thousand words, then this book is worth sixty two thousands words to describe the surreal photographs. Definitely not enough room here to convey what I think is a remarkable look at cemeteries in and around New Orleans. William Greiner is a genius with a camera,who has taken the cemetery photograph and made it into a haunting, beautiful work of art.

I am fascinated with New Orleans and the River Road area and it's history .This has to be one of the best publications about this subject. Sexton seems to capture so much of it's history in the pages of this book, more so than any other author has. The photography is also wonderful and straight forward. I recommend it to any one who wants to learn more about southern Louisiana plantations.

Although I've never been on River Road I feel this book brought me an authentic glimpse of life during the plantation era. The photographs are amazing and the book kept me spellbound for hours!! What fascinanted me most was how some plantations looked as if their inhabitants literally walked out the door and never looked back. Fine furniture, pictures, personal posessions were just left to slowly rot under leaky ceilings and caving roofs. On my next trip to New Orleans I will make it a priority to take a trip down River Road.

I spent many summers on St Joseph's Plantation which is next to the more famous Oak Alley Plantation in Vacherie,La. I was pleased to see that Richard Sexton was able to bring to life the many beautiful plantation homes in his book. The photography is spectacular! I would recommend this book to anyone considering a tour of the River Road. Mr. Sexton accomplished the difficult task of presenting the "grandeur" of planation life in this book.

I have not yet purchased the book (I promise I will) but my wife and I recently had the pleasure of meeting the author, Greg Cowman. He tends bar at the Napolean House in New Orleans (quite possibly one of the best bars in the country, by the way.) If his uncle's food comes out as good as the Bloody Mary's that Greg made for us, this has to be a great book!

I worked with Chef Tom at the Upperline. I went from New Orleans to cook in the South Pacific and Aspen. Chef Tom's way of doing things is absolutely classic. He had a way of settling on and emphasizing classic combinations of flavour that I have never seen matched; it was instinctive. After knowing Tom I have never met anyone else worthy of the title "chef". His was a flawless palate, as broad as it was deep. It amuses me to see TV chefs lionized in the media when Tom did his work so well with no applause. Chef Tom said once that there is a difference between cookbooks and recipe books; THIS is a cookbook.

I recieved a copy of this cookbook for my birthday last month. Talk about a gift that keeps giving. I am able to find a delicious recipie for almost any ocassion. Dinner, brunch, picnics, or special events. The easy going instuctions are trustworthy. ( I don't feel I have to try the recipie before an event.) Secrets of a New Orleans Chef has given me compliments from those I've cooked for I never would have expected.Two friends have requested the name of the book for purchase. One of them is a chef in a local Italian restaurant. He said "my" duck was unbelievable.

I highly recoomend this book for amatures and gourmets alike.

Nicole Bullock

This is a good primer in real Cajun Cuisine. The recipe for Tarte Ala boullie is worth the price of the cookbook alone. This is a custard pie with a risen, sweetened crust. Le Gateau Au Vin, or Cake of wine is also an excellent dessert as is the fig cake which is so sticky, and sweet that even after one puts plenty of flour down on the pan, it still sticks to the pan. I say this is a good primer, because many of the recipes are simple, but they provide a good beginning when creating a dish. For example, there is a recipe for beef and cabbage jambalaya which is simply ground beef, cabbage, and rice, but it gave me the idea to kick it up a few knotches. I use beef stew meat that I cut by hand, real homemade beef stock, bay leaf, and tomato. I created an excellent dish based on the original. Of course, there are plenty of very good shrimp recipes in this cookbook. Corn soup with shrimp, shrimp sauce picante, and shrimp potato balls all turned out to be recipes worth repeating. The only bad part about this book would be that even bad Cajun recipes are included. One was chicken-okra gumbo. It was so heavy on the okra that it became a bowl of slime. No one, not Justin Wilson, or even Emeril Lagasse know how to properly cook okra. Unless it is to be fried, okra should never be sliced. It should always be cooked whole to prevent the sliminess that repels most people from eating okra. I also believe that only butter should be used when making a roux, and in a dish like gumbo file, it should be cooked a day ahead of time, and refrigerated. The following day the grease should be spooned off the top before reheating, and serving.

There is a very good reason that this book has been in print for these many years, it is sound and complete! Before it was all the rage, before TV chefs and countless others were jumping on the Cajun food bandwagon, this book was there! As a Louisiana cookbook author myself, I must admit, when all is said and done, this one has not only become the granddaddy of them all, but it is the most thorough and it's still the best HANDS DOWN! (Don't Take My Word For It, check it out!)

I have spent my entire lifetime eating cajun food, and most of my adult life cooking it. Many of the recipes used by my grandmothers and my mother were lost to me, but since I discovered CAJUN CUISINE, I have recovered many of them. I have eaten, at one time or another, almost everything listed in this book, and as a bonafide cajun who grew up in the country where money was scarce but food was not, I can assure any reader that these recipes are as authentic as the cajuns themselves, and were designed to feed families well with tasty, inexpensive, and plentiful food products. BRAVO to Mr. W. Thomas Angers for a job well done.

It took me a while to finally get around to reading "Deep in the Shade of Paradise" but am I ever glad I did! The characters are so quirky, colorful and yet insightful. Dufresne is a master Southern storyteller. This is one of those books that you think would make a good movie or play because it's SO AWESOME and you realize that the reason it's so awesome is that more is felt, dreamt, and imagined than said.

As I said in my review title, this would've earned 5 stars if it wasn't for Louisiana Power & Light. The only downside to this book is that when I finished the book I didn't find myself missing the characters as much as I did when I finished LP&L.

I'll read any book set in Louisiana and am seldom disappointed.
Deep in the Shade of Paradise was no exception. Like Eudora Welty's Delta Wedding, the cast of characters is enormous, quirky, and memorable. A classic love triangle, it's the story of a wedding interrupted by the third party, a death, and an equally important sub-plot. Well, actually, about 10 subplots.
Read it - and prepare to laugh and enjoy while pressing a cold glass of sweet tea to your forehead to ward off the humidity.

How Dufresne can accomplish so much in the space of so few pages is beyone me. THIS should be the book you BUY and read this year. BUY it, because, I promise, you'll want to read it again and again. It affected me as THE SHIPPING NEWS did, with characters so memorable and plot so rich and believable, that I was not content to read it only once.

Although I have not used many recipes, the book is certainly a wonderful way of cooking healthy without loosing the flavor. I purchased the book "used" from amazon marketplace and was very pleased with the condition of the book as well as the way the transaction was performed. I would give her a 5 star rating.

I can't believe this book is out of print. My wife and I own a couple of shelves full of cook books, everything from The Joy of Cooking to the Moosewood books and books of regional quisine, such as Turkish. When we don't know what to cook, this is the book we turn to. We've never made anything out of this book that we didn't like.
Some of the recipes, as other reviewers have commented, can be involved. Many are not. The best part, the food is wonderful and you don't have to feel that twinge of guilt from just having added to the clogging of your arteries.

Chef Paul Prudhomme creates that Louisiana taste, but without the gobs of butter and other oils that usually go into this rich, flavorful cuisine.

Because Chef Paul had already developed a system of layering flavors (with spices, herbs, stocks, other juices) he was able to translate this knowledge of deep flavors to compensate for the absence of fats in the dishes he normally would make.

Fat carries aromas and flavor to our nose and taste buds. And it produces a certain feel to foods. Chef Prudhomme replaces the lost ingredient with fruit juices, intense but fat-free stocks and mixes of spices that are added in series to preserve their intensity and build the taste.

So, you don't have to stare nightly at a plate of lettuce, steamed chicken breast and rice if you don't want to. You can make oven fried fish, turkey and many other tasty dishes that will still be within your dietary restrictions.

Because this is a chef's book, the methods are sometimes time-consuming (like making stock.) And the very method of layering takes some time as well. So this is not a quick-to-the-table book but one that can teach techniques to enhance your own recipes.

RRRI has all of the wonderful dishes that celebrate the best in Louisiana cuisine. If you are looking to cook like a chef this book will help you achieve your dreams. Be sure to try the most celebrated recipe of "Spinach Madeleine". It is sublime! The jalapeno cheese roll can be substituted with the same amount of the processed mexican cheese.
Bon Appetit!

If you are from Louisiana or have any kind of ties to Louisiana, no matter how remote, you need to have all three River Road Recipe cookbooks in your collection. These books are the absolute authority in Louisiana cuisine and best of all,the recipes are from real Louisiana cooks, not trendy chefs. With over 1.7 million copies sold - you can't go wrong with these books!

If I could only own one cookbook, this would be it! In fact, for a while, it WAS my only cookbook. It contains so many different types of food. I absolutely love everything I've tried in this book. The recipes are very easy to follow and usually not very time consuming. One of my favorites is the Chicken Cacciatore. It's great! This book is something to pass down from generation to generation.

A great title and great unofficial advertising on Emeril Live. But it could have been much more diverse. I relize that was not the point of the book. But there had to be some recipes that people comonly made but were not creole. I guess I would have liked one or two exotic recipes.

My mamma's a Crochet, I am Catholic and my husband and I can each make a roux. I, also, am Cajun, know Marcelle and can attest to the authenticity of the recipes and accompanying stories. Many try to capitalize on the Cajun food craze, but few are the real deal. The only thing better than the recipes in Marcelle's book is enjoying them with she and her husband over dinner from their kitchen.

Although I wasn't raised in Lousiana, I love the food, and I love this book. The home recipes and the family memoirs are too good to put down, in the kitchen or the easy chair. If you only buy one cajun cookbook, buy this one.