Billy Grace is proud that he has risen above his working-class background and the insular prejudices of white New Orleans' society to become not only the king of New Orleans Carnival but also an ally of some key black politicians. Yet she finds that the husband of her dreams comes with challenges she never imagined. Belinda Rawlins struggled to overcome teenage pregnancy and abusive relationships in pursuit of not one, but two college degrees. Much of the personal drama in this book has nothing to do with the events of Aug. The stories of these people alternate, so that the overall history of the city is advanced by each of the characters and their tales. There is not a single narrative here this is a cumulative telling. 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.īaum's story moves forward through the failure of the levees during Hurricane Katrina and the rebuilding that followed the flooding. 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.
To make his case, Baum takes nine New Orleanians, threads, if you will, and weaves their stories into a tapestry of the city. 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." "As for money, New Orleanians like it well enough, but not so they'd bend their lives out of shape to get some. 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. By Dan Baum (Spiegel & Grau 335 pages $26)ĭan Baum begins his book out on a limb.
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