Dan Baum dazzled us with his coverage of post-Katrina New Orleans. The former writer for the New Yorker moved to the Big Easy four months after the storm, and chronicled his trips, by bicycle, to every nook and cranny of the city. He was there for the first post-storm Mardi Gras, there as pioneering residents of the Ninth Ward returned to rebuild their homes, there to witness the resurgence of crime as gangs began to take over empty houses in Central City. Baum’s blog was a must read while he was filing dispatches to the New Yorker.
Now Baum, who lives in Bolder, Colorado, has just published a book telling the story of the city through the eyes of its determined residents. Nine Lives begins with stories that predate the 1965 hurricane, Betsy, the big one that knocked out power for over a week and flooded the Ninth Ward. Encompassing a cross section of lives over the course of 40 years, from Betsy up through Katrina, Baum examines what makes the people and the city of New Orleans the extraordinary place it has always been.
Baum’s eye for detail, his ear for language, and his compassionate spirit allow the nine speakers to come to life in a way few writers ever achieve. Praise for Nine Lives comes from some of the state’s most respected writers, who have themselves written about and experienced the trauma of Katrina.
“Nine Lives is stunning work. Dan Baum has immersed himself in New Orleans, the most fascinating city in the United States, and illuminated it in a way that is as innovative as Tom Wolfe on hot rods and Truman Capote on a pair of murderers. Full of stylistic brilliance and deep insight and an overriding compassion, Nine Lives is an instant classic of creative nonfiction.”—Robert Olen Butler, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain
“Dan Baum tests the power of a very haunting place to bring these beautifully crafted narratives into a coherent whole—and New Orleans comes through with soulful aplomb. Nine Lives is a masterful portrait of a fragile American outpost between two terrible storms.” —Jed Horne, author of Breach of Faith: Hurricane Katrina and the Near Death of a Great American City
“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
Nine Lives: Death and Life in New Orleans is available at Barnes and Noble, for $26, or from Amazon.com for $17.
In rendering his ruling, District Judge John Trahan all but called the real estate developer a liar for inconsistencies in his accounts of what prompted him to punch a school teacher unconscious.
Frank’s Casing Crew, now doing business as Frank’s International, will make its final appearance on ABiz’s list of the Top 50 Privately Held Companies in Acadiana this year, and once again, it will likely be at the top with more than $1 billion in annual revenues. The 75-year-old company specializing in tubular fabrication and installation services to the oil and gas industry plans to go public this year.
The defeat, or rather highjacking of House Bill 420 in the final days of this year's Legislative Session, say Reps. Vincent Pierre and Terry Landry, is the result of the propaganda spread by one unidentified local media outlet and an unnamed former state Representative, but nothing to do with the original legislation's lack of checks, balances or details.
City-Parish Council Chairman Brandon Shelvin heaped steady doses of condescending ire on a Blue Cross/Blue Shield of Louisiana executive while failing to reveal his financial ties to a BC/BS rival.
Abbeville native David Primeaux was a popular professor until his death late last year, and while he was successful at camouflaging a dark past, he couldn’t outlive it.
Tehmi Chassion’s failure to recuse himself in the school board’s selection of a group health benefits provider raises ‘serious questions’ on whether he violated state ethics law.
He’s a singer. A songwriter. A piano man. A family man. He’s even got his own Wikipedia entry. He’s David Egan. And he knows ancient secrets about the monolithic stones of Stonehenge that he’s not willing to share.
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