Boulder author Dan Baum’s new book is “Nine Lives: Death and Life in New Orleans.” More specifically it tells the stories of nine people who live in the city, post-Hurricane Katrina.
Baum was a member of the staff of the New Yorker magazine in 2005, and went to New Orleans to report on Katrina. In and out of the city for a year, he grew tired of storm-related stories and began feeling a fascination for the recovering city and its people.
“They were coming back to their city, without jobs, without houses, without money, but coming back because it was the place they knew and loved,” he told the Boulder Rotary Club recently.
“New Orleans is a special place,” said. “It might be called the anti-Boulder. Time, money, personal conditions have different meanings in New Orleans. Up here we have more money than time. In New Orleans it’s the other way around.”
The city’s customs, such as Mardi Gras, are often what everyone associates with New Orleans. But there’s not just a parade on the day before Ash Wednesday, Baum said.
“There are similar parades every week,” said Baum. “They don’t get publicity, and they occur everywhere in the city, in moneyed neighborhoods and in neighborhoods still mired in Katrina disaster.”
Before Katrina, surveys found that people in New Orleans said, at twice the rate of any other U.S. city, that they were “very satisfied” with their lives. “Maybe it’s because people there live in the moment,” Baum said. “They don't pay so much attention to the future – the future doesn't exist.”
Baum’s book profiles nine individuals. One is the director of a high school band, some of whose students have come back to the city by themselves just to take part in the band. He told Baum, “They can’t play for me unless they have a 3.0 GPA, stay out of trouble and are prompt in coming to appointments.”
In a school system widely regarded as troubled, his band is providing an anchor for teen students and teaching them social skills that will help them move through life with greater success.
Baum begins his stories in 1965, when the city flooded as it did forty years later, and carries them forward to 2007. The nine different people share their different lives, different social positions – and their commonality as people of a unique city.
For more information on the book, see www.danbaum.com.
For more information on Rotary, see www.boulderrotary.org or www.rotary.org.
BOULDER ROTARY CLUB
5390 Manhattan Circle, Suite 101 Boulder, Colorado, 80303
303-554-7074 Rotary@roycearbour.com
Fax 720-304-3255 www.BoulderRotary.org
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Contact: Sue Deans, 303-579-9580
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