'Nine Lives,' by Dan Baum
Lolis Eric Elie, Special to The Chronicle
Wednesday, March 11, 2009
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2009/03/10/DD9916353N.DTL Nine Lives
Death and Life in New Orleans
By Dan Baum
(Spiegel & Grau; 335 pages; $26)
Dan Baum begins his book out on a limb. Before he has even introduced us to the New Orleanians from whose nine lives he has taken his title, he makes a sweeping statement, one that seeks to define the otherness of these people and the strangeness of their place.
"As for money, New Orleanians like it well enough, but not so they'd bend their lives out of shape to get some. ... New Orleanians tend to identify more with the welfare of their families, neighborhoods, wards, bands, krewes, second-line clubs, and Mardi Gras Indian tribes than with their own personal achievement, and so are largely free from the insatiable desire for individual aggrandizement that afflicts the rest of us."
To make his case, Baum takes nine New Orleanians, threads, if you will, and weaves their stories into a tapestry of the city. A wounded cop, a king of Carnival, a preoperative transsexual bar owner, the matriarch of a Mardi Gras Indian gang, a public school band director, a trumpet-playing coroner, a streetcar track repairman with a curator's vision, a single mother with get-out-of-the-ghetto aspirations and a ne'er-do-well day laborer - these are Baum's people. He begins their tales in 1965, when Hurricane Betsy had flooded much of New Orleans and when the United States Army Corps of Engineers promised that its levees would protect against a disaster in the future.
