RaveHouston Chronicle\"With City of a Million Dreams, Berry has turned his considerable reporting prowess toward profiling the city he loves like no other with an abundantly evident, ardent passion ... extraordinary ... The result of over a quarter century of Berry’s indefatigable research, this 332-page, extensively footnoted and annotated work captures the reader’s attention with a cavalcade of astoundingly detailed accounts of the exploits and adventures of a cornucopia of outstanding people who have left an enduring mark on New Orleans and the conflicts that have forged its distinctive urban culture ... Perhaps Berry’s greatest achievement in writing this book is to create a seamless, holographic tapestry out of the many disparate threads in New Orleans’ history, tying together stories from its Spanish, French, American, Confederate, Reconstruction and post-Reconstruction periods, during which it reinvented itself in line with the mythology of what 19th-century white supremacists called the Lost Cause — through the civil rights movement and desegregation all the way to Katrina and the city’s rebirth ... City of a Million Dreams is an inspiring response to those who would have left New Orleans to decay away in the wake of Katrina, a tale of resilience and progress in the face of great odds.\
Alfredo Corchado
RaveThe San Antonio Express-NewsThis book...is an eloquently gripping testimonio, both a memoir of the author’s struggles to develop a successful binational identity and a critique of our nation’s shifting, fractured immigration policies ... Recounting the dynamics of their fellowship and struggles, Corchado conveys in vivid terms the difficulties faced by people of Mexican and other Latino backgrounds in adapting to a country where binational and bicultural identities have been actively discouraged. More significantly, though, Corchado uses his own history of coming from a family divided by immigration—one side in the U.S., the other remaining in Mexico—to educate the reader about the manner in which immigration policies once based on outmoded racist assumptions about \'other\' peoples have produced such mixed results ... Corchado ably profiles the profound changes in American demographics taking place as Mexican-born migrant workers and refugees have found niches in the American economy, and how people in disparate communities have responded differently to those challenges.
