Bayou Farewell by Mike Tidwell

Bayou Farewell by Mike Tidwell

The Cajun coast of Louisiana is home to a way of life as unique, complex, and beautiful as the terrain itself.  As award-winning travel writer Mike Tidwell journeys through the bayou, he introduces us to the food and the language, the shrimp fisherman, the Houma Indians, and the rich cultural history that makes it unlike any other place in the world. But seeing the skeletons of oak trees killed by the salinity of the groundwater, and whole cemeteries sinking into swampland and out of sight, Tidwell also explains why each introduction may be a farewell--as the storied Louisiana coast steadily erodes into the Gulf of Mexico.

Part travelogue, part environmental exposé, Bayou Farewell is the richly evocative chronicle of the author's travels through a world that is vanishing before our eyes.

In the Mountains of Paradise, Amazon Stranger, and The Ponds of Kalambayi are just a few of Mike Tidwell's earlier works. Tidwell is a former National Endowment for the Arts fellow whose work has appeared in National Geographic Traveler, Reader's Digest, Washingtonian, and a variety of other magazines. He has won four Lowell Thomas Awards, the highest honor in American travel journalism, for his regular travel essays for The Washington Post. With his wife, Catherine, and their son, Sasha, he lives near Washington, D.C.