Views
from a Front Porch
Living
in a Beach House on the Gulf Coast
by
Paul Estronza La Violette
Illustrated by Stig Marcussen
173 pp
$19.95 Hardback with Dust Jacket
©
1999 by Paul Estronza La Violette
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Reviewers:
The Sea Coast Echo
The Sun Herald
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'Views' offers insight to Coast
| The Sea
Coast Echo |
Reviewed Thursday,
October 14, 1999 |
A book about us
Paul Estronza La Violette has been a oceanographer for almost 40 years, working with the government, Mississippi State University and -- more recently -- with his own company Heron Laboratories.
La Violette spent years researching aboard aircraft and ships in most of the world's oceans, spending most of his time in the Arctic Ocean, the Mediterranean Sea and the Gulf of Mexico.
While he's no new comer to writing -- he has published oceanographic
atlases, books and papers on the circulation of the world's
oceans and seas, "Views from a Front Porch: Living
in a Beach House on the Mississippi Gulf Coast"
is his first non-scientific publication.
La Violette, still by no means retired, now spends much more of his time at his beach house in Waveland with his wife Stella and weimaraner Jennie.
And now he takes the time to train his researcher's eye on the people and places around him and to record his "findings."
But while the book is meticulously detailed, it is far from some boring, scientific treatise.
An easy way of life
"Views from a Front Porch" is a book
about Waveland, Bay St. Louis, and Pass Christian.
A book about the way we live and what it is like to be here in a Mississippi coastal community.
There are no murders in this book, no fictional detectives or federal agents looking for terrorists.
Just the everyday, normal, wonderfully unique life we have here on the Mississippi coast. And that is what the book is all about.
And yet just about anyone reading the book should feel gratified in his or her reading and relate to what the author tells us of how he and his wife have lived in Waveland for the last 25 years.
La Violette goes a step further in his book. He is a marine scientist and sees the world of the coastal marsh and Mississippi Sound in a different way than many of us see it.
And in his book, he takes time to describe much of this and how it affects he and his wife's lives as that of the people of the coast.
It's an easy book to read. You start anywhere in it and read a chapter or two and put it down and be pleasantly entertained. The style of writing is relaxed, at times lyrically, at times humorous.
"Views from a Front Porch" is definitely
a good read.
And, true to the local story teller tradition, La Violette enjoys
feedback from his audience, and invites readers to contact him
by e-mail at laviolette@datasync.com.
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Writer appreciates everyday Coast life
| The Sun
Herald |
Reviewed Sunday,
October 10, 1999 |
Waveland resident Paul Estronza La Violette began writing about life on the Coast for his grandchildren.
"I made 15 or so copies and started handing them out," he said. "Then, I discovered people were passing them around in town. So I expanded it and it became a book."
The result is "Views from a Front Porch: Living
in a Beach House on the Mississippi Gulf Coast."
"I live in a house by the water," La Violette begins his introduction to the book. " ... I've lived other places, but I've lived here the longest. This is my home. The people here are my friends. I've found that sitting on the porch of this house and watching the water is different from anyplace I've ever lived."
La Violette moved to the Coast in late 1975 as part of a Navy oceanographic research group that was relocated from Washington DC, to what is now John C. Stennis Space Center in Hancock County.
He and his new bride, Stella, were unable to find a house on the Coast to their liking. So they bought property on Beach Boulevard and built Heron Home.
La Violette said he had difficulty finding a publisher for his book too.
"They said it's too regional," he said.
Well, pooh on the publishers. Coastians will enjoy La Violette's descriptions of fishing, boating, crabbing, frolicking with his beloved dogs and sharing life with Stella. They will identify with the spontaneous gatherings of neighbors of watch sunsets, talk about the weather or just mellow out.
After reading "Views from a Front Porch,"
I want to visit Heron Home, where every room has a view of the
Mississippi Sound and a central atrium with a garden.
"I'd never thought too much of pelicans in the years I spent at sea," La Violette writes.
But, he learns, "They are the most graceful of flyers. I would watch a pelican skimming impossibly low over the water, and except for slight feather corrections, remaining absolutely motionless, falling in a long, drawn out, perfectly controlled manner, floating on a weakening cushion of air, that holds it on and on and lower and lower, until the last moment it would catch itself and, with several quick flaps of it's wings, rise up to a height of eight to ten feet, then begin the long, beautifully graceful skimming, controlled fall again."
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