Non-Fiction Pick of the Week: Nine Lives

Nine Lives: death and life in New Orleans by Dan Baum 2009

Nine Lives provides a unique perspective on the disaster that was Hurricane Katrina. By profiling the lives of nine individuals who lived in New Orleans from 1965’s Hurricane Betsy to the devastation of Hurricane Katrina in 2005, Dan Baum not only provides historical context for Katrina, but also gives you a window into what makes New Orleans so unique, so worth saving, and so difficult to save. The intertwined mini-biographies allow you to peer into the lives of people from different social classes, political orientations, and world views, always pointing back to how New Orleans shapes the people who live there. New Orleans is shown as a city with a culture foreign to the rest of the United States. Baum makes a case for its’ beauty, tradition, and family oriented lifestyle. By the same token, he outlines how its unwillingness to change economic attitudes to keep pace with the rest of the country and a lack of racial integration make it even more difficult to rebuild the city after Katrina. Nine Lives makes for an excellent read for those interested in culture, politics, history, and biographies.