John Pope, author of a book titled "Getting Off at Elysian Fields: Obituaries from the Times-Picayune," at 7 p.m., Wednesday, April 5, at 7 p.m., Wednesday, April 5, at the Jane O'Brien Chatelaine West Bank Regional Library, 2751 Manhattan, Harvey.

This event is free of charge and is open to the public.

No city in America knows how to mark death with more funerary panache than New Orleans. The pageants commemorating departed citizens are often works of performance art. A grand obituary is key to this Stygian passage. Collected here are not just simple, mindless recitations of schools and workplaces, marriages, and mourners bereft.

There are stories about Carnival monarchs, great philanthropists, and a few politicians, but because New Orleans embraces eccentric behavior, there are stories of people who lived life in unusual ways. Included in the book are obituaries of the doctor who used his plasma to make his flowers grow, and the philanthropist who took money she had put aside for a fur coat to underwrite the lawsuit that desegregated Tulane University. A letter carrier everyone loved turned out to have been a spy during World War II, and a fledgling lawyer changed his lifelong thoughts about race when he saw blind people going into a Christmas party through separate doors¯one for white people and another for African Americans. There is the story of the punctilious judge who got down on his hands and knees to edge his lawn¯with scissors.

John Pope has written obituaries throughout his 44-year career in journalism and was a member of the New Orleans Times-Picayune team that won two Pulitzer Prizes, a National Headliner Award, and a George Polk Award for coverage of Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath.

For more information regarding this presentation, contact Chris Smith, manager of adult programming for the library, at 504-889-8143 or wcsmith@jefferson.lib.la.us.