Hurricane Katrina devastated the property, and although the house might have been salvaged, government teams razed it without the family’s permission. For years, the Brooms kept determinedly and nostalgically mowing its empty lot; the author has rescued souvenirs there as poignant as a bent silver spoon. The book sheds unflattering light on postwar developers, who claimed that the neighborhood’s pestilent cypress swamps could be turned into choice real estate as New Orleans pursued “the complete realization of its destiny.”

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Why do Scandinavian architects perch cabins on stilts at rocky waterfronts and use helicopters to deliver construction materials on otherwise inaccessible mountainsides? Their clients have commissioned the remote shelters partly as escapes from “the growing pressures of the urban, digital world,” the architecture writer Dominic Bradbury observes in “New Nordic Houses” (Thames & Hudson, $60, 320 pp.). Exterior walls are made of aluminum or basalt, to withstand seawater and snowstorms, and roofs are softened with planes of sedum and grass. Mr. Bradbury devotes a chapter to floor plans, elevations and cross sections, revealing how many geometric contortions are required to make homes fit along knotty outcroppings.

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Wallcoverings depicting ruins crumbling on steep cliffs, volcanoes threatening villages and harbors besieged by soldiers have been highly sought after since the 1790s or so. “Zuber: Two Centuries of Panoramic Wallpaper” (Gibbs Smith, $75, 280 pp.), by the historian Brian D. Coleman, is a sumptuous coffee-table book about historical and contemporary interiors lined in the French manufacturer Zuber’s printed scenery as striking as Mexican jungle outposts and Revolutionary War battlefields. The densely patterned rooms, whether intended for armchair travelers or returnees from colonial expeditions, appear to be transporting places to live.