Song for My Fathers (2006)

Returning to his hometown, New Orleans, Tom Sancton places his hands on Preservation Hall's wrought-iron gates and peers in, recalling a city that ''had mostly faded into history long before Katrina struck — a victim of time, progress, and the eternal passing of generations.'' TIME's ex-Paris bureau chief (and an accomplished clarinetist) honors his father, a white writer with progressive views, and ''the mens,'' the black and Creole musicians who accepted the author into their ranks. When George Lewis plays a lick and tells a young Sancton, ''Make that,'' he invites him also to imagine a world beyond racism. Sancton's prose in Song for My Fathers seduces like a good second-line parade.