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Aftermath

The Faces of Hurricane Katrina

Nine Lives, Dan Baum’s personal portrait of New Orleans.

Dan Baum went to New Orleans two days after the levees broke on assignment for The New Yorker. Four years later, has released Nine Lives: Death and Life in New Orleans, a rich tableau of the haunting images of Hurricane Katrina. The book is written in a “close third-person,” which gives the portraits of several survivors—from a “womanizing gynecologist” to a jailbird—a personal and intimate touch. In a New York Times review, Thomas Mallon writes that the book is “splendid,” although Baum is occasionally too sentimental about his subject matter.

Read it at The New York Times

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