Nine Lives: Death and Life in New Orleans

This is the most powerful and moving book that I have read in a good long while -- so much so that certain passages brought tears to my eyes. I looked forward to reading it every evening and regretted that it had to end. It is simultaneously heartbreaking and uplifting, and I already know that it is a book I will look at time and time again. This is journalism of the highest order, and it reminds us that the true drama is found not in Hollywood scripts, but rather in the lives of real people. I have recommended this book to all my friends and am pleased to be able to do so here. Thanks, Mr. Baum, for this wonderful piece of work.

A doctor turned coroner, a band and music teacher, a transit system worker, an ambitious woman struggling to achieve a college education, a transexual bar owner and former college football player, a wealthy accountant... These are among the characters whose very disparate lives are woven together in this book that is about all of them and none of them; rather, it is about the city that they share, New Orleans. "New Orleanians really want nothing more than for everything to stay the same," Dan Baum writes in his introduction to this compelling oral history of the city's misadventures over the last forty-plus years. As well all know, far from staying the same, everything in New Orleans underwent a seismic change in 2005, when Hurricane Katrina blew in from the Gulf of Mexico and along with the floods that followed, transformed the city's geography in every conceivable way. Its citizens were scattered all over the country, the lower Ninth Ward -- home to some of those whom Baum profiles in his book -- was destroyed. While Katrina's devastation is the raison d'etre for Baum's book, the events of those horrible days in August and September, 2005 are simply the climax of the lives of the New Orleanians he tells the story through. Or perhaps I should say that his nine characters choose him to tell their tales of the lives they lived in the city that they loved and sometimes hated but couldn't imagine living without. It's the story of a city and of the many ways of life that coexisted within it, of the unique 'live for the day' ethos that prevailed there and its strong sense of community. Once past the introduction, the reader never hears Baum's authorial voice again; each step in the evolution of New Orleans from the cleanup after the devastation of Hurricane Betsy in 1965 to the last thoughts about Katrina's legacy decades later is seen through the eyes of one of the people he profiles. We see Wil Rawlins struggle to rescue some of the parentless children growing up in the city's housing projects by introducing them to the wonders of New Orleans's musical traditions -- in particular the high school marching band. Ronald Lewis battles for equal pay for the (African American) men who repair the St. Charles streetcar line; Joyce Montana watches her husband transform the African American Mardi Gras traditions. Meanwhile, 'uptown', accountant Billy Grace faces his own battles, such as the scornful attitude the city's elite has for his efforts to build a business and create wealth of his own. The result is something that only the strongest of writers and journalists could produce. The deeply personal narratives -- small chapters, each revolving around events, small and large, in the life of one of Baum's characters -- are interwoven to the extent that events in their lives dictate. But Baum never makes the mistake of trying to develop some kind of master narrative to which his characters' lives become subordinated. Instead, they speak for themselves.

Baum, Dan. "Nine Lives: Death and Life in New Orleans", Spiegel and Grau, 2009, Intersecting Lives Amos Lassen Sitting here in Little Rock, Arkansas, I often wonder what my life would have held for me in New Orleans had it not been for Hurricane Katrina. Even though I was born and raised in New Orleans, it had not been home for me for a long time and having returned to the city right before Katrina made me realize that even more. But there is something about that city that gets under one's skin and even though I never really loved it there. New Orleans is still my city of birth and I suppose that makes me miss it every once in a while. Katrina will always being a defining moment in my life and I read almost everything that comes out about it. I must say that Dan Baum's "Nine Lives" is the best book dealing with Katrina that I have read so far and that is probably because it is about so much more than the storm. The book captures the range of the New Orleans experience and it touches on the issues of race, age, class and gender and we learn of not only was lost to Katrina but also what was found by the survivors. Baum writes with great style and he pays tribute to the most interesting and most broken American city. As I sit here and write this today, Mardi Gras, 2009, I can't help but be wistful about New Orleans--"Nine Lives" was just the book I needed to read today as I watched Rex, the Lord of Misrule, parade down St, Charles Avenue via my computer's cam. Baum moved to New Orleans after Katrina so he could write for "The New Yorker" about how the city responded to the disaster. It did not take him long to learn that there was so much more than Katrina to write about and he was faced with the question as to why people, not just New Orleanians, are so obsessed with the city even knowing that is crime-filled, poor and violent. He finds his answer by looking at the lives of nine people over a forty year period which is bordered by two storms--Hurricane Betsy in 1960 which drastically changed the city and Katrina in 2005 which almost washed it away. The nine lives represent all strata of the New Orleans populace--outsiders, a transsexual bar owner, a coroner, a former Rex, king of carnival. These are the kinds of lives that are unique to New Orleans. There is one other character in the book and this one stands above all of the others--the city itself. New Orleans is a place that is filled with contradiction and it is an anomaly in fabric of America. This is why it is so important that New Orleans be saved. Like the city, the characters here are very real and they the story of their city. Their stories fascinate--they make you laugh and they make you cry but above all, they are real and Baum is a master in the way he tells them. I love, love, love this book--it is compelling and it is beautifully and eloquently written.

I've been looking forward to Nine Lives since I happened to meet Dan Baum on a great trip I took to New Orleans a couple of years ago. He said he was working on a book about NOLA residents after Katrina. But it is so much more! The book is a cultural history, starting in 1965 and relating different aspects of the city through people of all different backgrounds and social strata. Baum manages to work in so many rich details and observations on what makes the city unique--language, the nuances of the Mardi Gras and Indian traditions, little asides about the food. As a result, you don't get to Katrina and its aftermath until well into the book--before that, you see how the city slid into a depression when the ports scaled back jobs, and when crack flooded the streets. It makes the hurricane that much more devastating. This is a beautifully written book, completely engrossing. If you're from NOLA, have ever visited there, or are even thinking about visiting there, read this book.

New Orleans is a city full of contradictions, a place out of context with the rest of America. It defies understanding, explanation, and most especially, classification. It's a quality the residents hold onto, this testament of uniqueness, even as the city has teetered time and again on the brink of destruction. I've lived near New Orleans for most of my life. I'm a frequent visitor there, and, like everyone else who comes, I've fallen in love with its decadent grandness, its welcoming, leisurely way of life. All manner of humanity calls New Orleans home, and the city embraces them all. It's a unique place, out of step with the rest of America, and that is exactly why it is so important to save. This has never been truer than now, as the great lady teeters on her knees, still struggling, three years later, to rise from the devastation of Katrina. Dan Baum, on assignment from The New Yorker after the storm, quickly learned all of these things. Along with his wife Margaret, he eventually moved to New Orleans in order to write a book, one which, using the timeframe between Betsy in 1965 and Katrina in 2005, captures perfectly what it means to love this city. Baum chose nine people he got to know after the storm, conducting hundreds of hours of interviews, writing the story of the city through their eyes. They are from vastly different ends of the socio-political spectrum, ranging from the widow of a revered Mardi Gras Indian chief to the long-time coroner of Orleans parish, from a transsexual bar owner to a former king of Rex and pillar of the Uptown community. Their stories are unique, yet a common thread runs through them all - the deep, abiding love of this place, of the home New Orleans offers to each. The author captures that love without being preachy or overly sentimental. New Orleans is far from a fairy-tale land of mutual respect, understanding, and tolerance. Poverty, desperation, and crime are huge, unending problems, and Baum acknowledges this by telling stories that are candid, real, and fraught with generations of loss and disappointment. They are also, however, stories of hope, of people who have risen, time and again, despite adversity after adversity. Many people in the rest of the United States have questioned why we should rebuild such a place, crippled as it is by poverty and corruption. It takes spending time in New Orleans to learn its value, I suppose, to experience the unique magic that makes this city special. If you can't visit, however, read this book. Dan Baum has clearly seen and understands. Five Stars.