Nine Lives: Death and Life in New Orleans
by Dan Baum

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.

"Dan Baum writes with grace and heart in this extraordinary homage to that most beautiful and broken of America's cities, New Orleans. This is an important American story, and Dan Baum has done a wonderful thing in telling it."
--Jon Lee Anderson, author of "Che" "Guevara: A Revolutionary Life" and "The Fall

"Nine Lives" reaches for, and grasps, an astonishing range of experience in New Orleans. In tracing the paths of these lives over decades, and across the lines of age, race, class, and gender, it gives an essential perspective on what was lost, and found, by the survivors of Hurricane Katrina. Dan Baum doesn't live in New Orleans, but New Orleans lives in him, and on every page of this harrowing, compassionate book.
--Tom Piazza, author of "City of Refuge" and "Why New Orleans Matters

ZH3199    Nine Lives: Death and Life in New Orleans             $26.00

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