Nine Lives: Death and Life in New Orleans – Dan Baum
On August 31, 2005, just two days after the levees broke and flooded New Orleans, journalist Dan Baum arrived in the city to report on the destruction and aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.
He stayed three weeks, in which time he met most of the people featured in “Nine Lives,” as they navigated the destruction. He spent the next several years (with his writing partner wife, Margaret) gathering personal histories that, for many, spanned decades.
The assorted “characters” are the diverse and colorful sort you’d expect: a transgender bar owner, the parish coroner, a lifelong Lower Ninth Ward resident, a small time criminal, a band director and his estranged wife, an old money businessman, a police officer and the family of Mardi Gras royalty.
While Baum’s love of New Orleans’ inhabitants and history is apparent, this well-written and researched — but horribly overstuffed and scattershot — book is not nearly as interesting as he thought it would be.
I picked this up prior to a work trip in the Big Easy, and my proximity to the locale and general love of the city was not enough to sustain interest over nearly 400-pages. By the end I was skimming chapters.
There were two main issues: timeline and personalities. We went years — sometimes decades — between check-ins with some folks making it difficult to keep track of them, and several people were just…boring.
Like Gene Weingarten’s “One Day: The Extraordinary Story of an Ordinary 24 Hours in America,” showed, sometimes us lay people aren’t very interesting. And, the stories and moments that were monumental to us, don’t make for riveting reading to strangers.
Maybe because it was anchored around Hurricane Katrina, I expected it to be more of a focus, but those chapters are scant. The most impactful memories were from those who stayed in New Orleans during landfall, but again, it’s a small section of the book.
If you were to pick this up, and I wouldn’t necessarily recommend it, the four most interesting individuals from start-to-finish were:
Joann Guidos, a transgender business owner whom the author met while visiting Kajun’s, the bar she kept open while the hurricane bore down, explores the difficulties in accepting yourself and having others accept you — even in one of the most live and let be cities in the world.
Anthony Wells, whom the author met at the Superdome, presents his pre, during and post-Katrina narrative as a stream of consciousness interview that explored how the road to hell is paved with good intentions.
Ronald Lewis, a lifelong resident whom the author first heard being interviewed on NPR, is the heart of the story, and he offered the most clear-eyed perspective on the past, present and future of the city.
Tim Bruneau, a New Orleans police officer on patrol during the storm, was one of the more difficult narratives because of his general racism and disregard for humanity. Whether from Bruenau’s ego or Baum’s interviewing skills, his candor is as impressive as it was jarring.
While I certainly learned a lot about Mardi Gras culture and history, thanks to the generally uninteresting narratives from Billy Grace (the businessman) and Joyce Montana (the Mardi Gras royalty), the rest of the stories felt more self-serving, specifically the Rawlins’ and Frank Minyard.
I was particularly disappointed with Minyard’s narrative. As the parish coroner he was ground zero for criminal investigations after the storm — he even pops up in the phenomenal AppleTV series “Five Days at Memorial” — but he spent most of his chapters navel-gazing rather than providing insight.
All-in-all, this would appeal most to people who like day-in-the-life narratives, but for those looking for history or insight about Hurricane Katrina and rebuilding New Orleans will be left disappointed.
Rating (story): 3/5 stars
Rating (narration): N/A
Formats: eBook (library loan)
Dates read: March 2 – March 12, 2023
Multi-tasking: N/A
