Nine Lives: Mystery, Magic, Death, and Life in New Orleans: Summary and book reviews of Nine Lives: Mystery, Magic, Death, and Life in New Orleans by Dan Baum, plus links to an excerpt from Nine Lives: Mystery, Magic, Death, and Life in New Orleans and a biography of Dan Baum.
Nine Lives: Mystery, Magic, Death, and Life in New Orleans
by Dan Baum
Paperback: Feb 2010,
368 pages.
Nines Lives is a multivoiced biography of a dazzling, surreal, and imperiled city, told through the lives of nine unforgettable characters and bracketed by two epic storms: Hurricane Betsy, which transformed New Orleans in the 1960s, and Hurricane Katrina, which nearly destroyed it. Dan Baum brings this kaleidoscopic portrait to life, showing us what was lost in the storm and what remains to be saved.
The New York Times Book Review - Thomas Mallon
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.
The Washington Post - Jason Berry
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.
The New York Times - Dwight Garner
…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.
Publishers Weekly
Starred Review. Baum's chronicle leaves readers with a bittersweet understanding of what Americans lost during Hurricane Katrina.
A sublime and seductive reading experience. Brilliantly conceived and masterfully written, this enormously engaging portrait of a most beguiling Southern city has become a modern classic.
The author of Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil returns after
more than a decade to give us an intimate look at the "magic, mystery, and
decadence" of the city of Venice and its inhabitants.
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