"Well-Reported and Colorful Tale of Jazz, Sex, Crime and Corruption"

"The reformers had triumphed over vice. But it wasn't a clean moral victory. They had also triumphed over tolerance. 'For the city’s privileged white elite, jazz and vice were of a piece, along with blackness generally and, for that matter, Italianness, too,' Krist writes. Therein lies this book's most important lesson: Rooting out sin may be worthy, but beware the unsavory motives that can lurk in the hearts of moral crusaders."


Walter Isaacson in The New York Times reviews Gary Krist's Empire of Sin: A Story of Sex, Jazz, Murder, and the Battle for Modern New Orleans.