Nine Lives: Death and Life in New Orleans
Dan Baum, 2009
Spiegel & Gau
352 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780385523202
Summary
After Hurricane Katrina, Dan Baum moved to New Orleans to write about the city’s response to the disaster for The New Yorker. He quickly realized that Katrina was not the most interesting thing about New Orleans, not by a long shot. The most interesting question, which struck him as he watched residents struggling to return, was this: Why are New Orleanians—along with people from all over the world who continue to flock there—so devoted to a place that was, even before the storm, the most corrupt, impoverished, and violent corner of America?
Here’s the answer. Nine Lives is a multivoiced biography of this dazzling, surreal, and imperiled city through the lives of nine characters over forty years and bracketed by two epic storms: Hurricane Betsy, which transformed the city in the 1960’s, and Katrina, which nearly destroyed it. These nine lives are windows into every strata of one of the most complex and fascinating cities in the world. From outsider artists and Mardi Gras Kings to jazz-playing coroners and transsexual barkeeps, these lives are possible only in New Orleans, but the city that nurtures them is also, from the beginning, a city haunted by the possibility of disaster. All their stories converge in the storm, where some characters rise to acts of heroism and others sink to the bottom. But it is New Orleans herself—perpetually whistling past the grave yard—that is the story’s real heroine.
Nine Lives is narrated from the points of view of some of New Orleans’s most charismatic characters, but underpinning the voices of the city is an extraordinary feat of reporting that allows Baum to bring this kaleidoscopic portrait to life with brilliant color and crystalline detail. Readers will find themselves wrapped up in each of these individual dramas and delightfully immersed in the life of one of this country’s last unique places, even as its ultimate devastation looms ever closer. By resurrecting this beautiful and tragic place and portraying the extraordinary lives that could have taken root only there, Nine Lives shows us what was lost in the storm and what remains to be saved. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
Dan Baum has been a staff writer for The New Yorker, as well as a reporter for the Wall Street Journal, the Asian Wall Street Journal, and the Atlanta Journal-Constitution.
He is the author of Citizen Coors: An American Dynasty and Smoke and Mirrors: The War on Drugs and the Politics of Failure. He has written numerous articles for such national magazines as The New York Times Magazine, Playboy, Rolling Stone, and Wired. While living in New Orleans to research Nine Lives, Dan wrote a daily online column for The New Yorker. (From the author's website.)
Book Reviews
At about page 65, something very real clicks in Nine Lives. The small, stray, unobtrusive details that Mr. Baum has been planting along the way begin coming together and paying off, like a slot machine that's begun to glow and vibrate. By the final third of Nine Lives, as the water begins pouring into the Lower Ninth Ward of New Orleans, I was weeping like an idiot in the coffee shop where I was reading.... Nine Lives may be this young year's most artful and emotionally resonating nonfiction book so far, and for that, to Mr. Baum, a belated New Year's toast.
Dwight Garner - New York Times
Aware of journalism's failure to reimagine New Orleans as it had been before the hurricane, Baum has written a splendid book that is two-thirds prologue. The winds and waters of Katrina don't begin battering the nine lives he puts on display until the reader is past Page 200, by which time his characters and their city have been realized in all their generosity and folly.
Thomas Mallon - New York Times Book Review
A spiritual saga strikingly different from [Baum's] magazine reporting. He says little about the political dynamics of Katrina and submerges his own voice as he weaves the experiences of nine New Orleans residents into a sinuous narrative. His technique brings to mind Robert Altman's film "Nashville," cutting between short scenes and longer vignettes from the lives of people who rarely intersect.... I applaud Baum's shimmering portrait of the city. He adroitly moves his subjects through parades, prison, divorces, sex changes, fancy balls and gun brawls—yes, the stuff of life here—showing New Orleans as a magnetic, enduring force.
Jason Berry - Washington Post
Baum’s reporting, which focuses on nine longtime New Orleans residents, is superb. So is his writing.
Atlanta Journal-Constitution
What makes these people so compelling is not where they live, nor that you know what lies ahead for them. It's about skill and craft.
Dallas Morning News
Brilliantly reported.... Compassionate and clear-eyed, Nine Lives brings you into the heart of an American tragedy.
People Magazine
Reporter Baum (Citizen Coors) arrived in New Orleans two days after the levees broke after Hurricane Katrina. He admits his initial accounts of the disaster were flawed, but with this captivating collection of nine linked profiles, Baum has rectified what he claims was his narrow interpretation of events. "While covering Katrina and its aftermath for The New Yorker, I noticed that most of the coverage, my own included, was so focused on the disaster that it missed the essentially weird nature of the place where it happened." Baum begins the narrative with the 1965 battering of the Ninth Ward by Hurricane Betsy and concludes in 2007. He captures the essence of the city "through the lives of nine characters over 40 years, bracketed by two epic hurricanes," people such as Billy Grace, the king of Carnival and member of New Orleans' elite; Tim Bruneau, the city cop haunted by images of Katrina's destruction; and transsexual JoAnn Guidos, who finds a home and, following Katrina, a sense of purpose. Baum, an empathetic storyteller, has nearly perfectly distilled the events, providing readers with a sensuous portrait of a place that can be better understood as "the best organized city in the Caribbean rather than the "worst organized city in the United States." Baum's chronicle leaves readers with a bittersweet understanding of what Americans lost during Hurricane Katrina.
Publishers Weekly
(Starred review.) What gives this collection of stories its added punch is the way Baum uses the fictional techniques of literary journalism.... The underpinning of solid reporting makes all this believable and powerful.
Booklist
One of those rare occasions when journalism crosses the threshold of art.
Discussion Questions
Use our LitLovers Book Club Resources; they can help with discussions for any book:
• How to Discuss a Book (helpful discussion tips)
• Generic Discussion Questions—Fiction and Nonfiction
• Read-Think-Talk (a guided reading chart)
Also consider these LitLovers talking points to help get a discussion started for Nine Lives:
1. Which of Baum's nine characters do you most relate to...and least relate to? What does each character reveal about the city of New Orleans—in terms of its culture and socio-economics?
2. How would you describe New Orleans? What is the portrait of the city—before Katrina—that comes through in Baum's book? His coverage goes back to 1965: how did the city change over those 40 years (up to and before Katrina)? What part of New Orleans and its history do you find most appealing...fascinating...or disturbing?
3. If you've ever traveled to New Orleans...or lived there...or still live there, talk about your experiences—about the city you know and love...or know and hate!
4. Talk about the ways in which each of the nine characters experienced—and was changed by—Katrina. How did Katrina reveal the inner strengths and/or weaknesses of the nine lives?
5. Baum covered New Orleans as a journalist during and post Katrina. Why did he depart from his journalism and decide to write this book? What did he believe a book could reveal that his articles and essays could not?
6. What were your reactions reading this book? What most horrified you about Katrina? What surprised you? And what have you learned from Nine Lives?
(Questions by LitLovers. Please feel free to use them, online or off, with attribution. Thanks.)
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