Author Jason Berry to speak
at LSUS Noel Memorial Library Nov. 16
10/06/06

Jason Berry, author of the recently released Last of the Red Hot Poppas, will speak in the Assembly Room on the third floor of the LSUS Noel Memorial Library at 10:30 a.m. on Thursday, Nov. 16. The presentation, sponsored by the James Smith Noel Collection and the LSUS Foundation, is free and open to the public.

Berry will also conduct a book signing from 12 Noon to 1:30 p.m. on Wednesday, Nov. 15, at Barnes & Noble in the Bayou Walk Shopping Center on Youree Drive at 70 th Street. Copies of Last of the Red Hot Poppas will also be available at the LSUS Bookstore located in the university’s Technology Center.

Berry is renowned for his pioneering investigative reporting on sexual abuse in the Catholic priesthood. Lead Us Not Into Temptation (1992) was the first major book on the church’s crisis and is still used in many newsrooms. He has worked as a consultant for ABC News and is routinely interviewed in the national media about Catholic church issues and his native city, New Orleans. Vows of Silence (2004) prompted a Vatican investigation and demotion of one of the most powerful priests in Rome. The author is putting the finishing touches on a film documentary based on that book. Berry is also a cultural chronicler of New Orleans in such books as Up From the Cradle of Jazz, a grand history of popular music. His play, “Earl Long in Purgatory,” won a 2002 Big Easy Award for best original work of theater. He has also received Guggenheim and Alicia Patterson fellowships for his research.

The comic novel, Last of the Red Hot Poppas, marks a new turn in this writer’s varied career. Last of the Red Hot Poppas is part ribald whodunit, part social satire and part “spiritual comedy,” as Berry calls it. It’s a chaotic romp through the many levels of “Looziana,” but above all, it is a novel about the struggle to maintain one’s integrity in a mad world of politics and power.