Nine Lives

New Orleans is a city that people love fiercely and fear for in equal measure, and Dan Baum approaches it through the people who have lived in it rather than through a straight chronicle. Nine Lives follows nine residents whose paths cross over four decades, and their voices together build a portrait of a place that is dazzling, surreal and always at risk.

The book is framed by two hurricanes. Betsy, in the 1960s, changed the city and the lives of those who endured it. Katrina, decades later, came close to destroying it. Between these storms, Baum moves through the years in the company of his nine subjects, letting each one show a different side of the city's character and history.

This is narrative nonfiction in the manner of a multivoiced biography, with the city itself as the central figure. Baum shows what the flood took away and what is still worth saving, and the result is a book for readers who want to understand New Orleans through the people who made it what it is.