Author and historian Ann Pond’s second book in her trilogy on Gulf Coast Mardi Gras landed in the Artifice email recently. Its relatively short length relative to the first work — roughly 66 pages apart from footnotes — made it a quick read, but that’s no indictment of its story.

If anything, Pond has revealed a history far more baroque than the shortened version so widely disseminated in these parts. Interwoven with so much of the cultural landscape and our nation’s knack for reinvention, she has given us a tale quintessentially American.

ARTIFICE

According to the author, “Masons and Mardi Gras” examines the private and public lives of the men behind the masks, the reason for all the secrecy, and the rumors that link Mardi Gras in New Orleans to the start of the Civil War.

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