A picture of a city in all its complexity

Photo - New Orleans's post-Katrina residents are the heart of Dan Baum's book. (Dina rudick/globe staff/file)

Story by Chuck Leddy, Globe Correspondent / Boston Globe

'Nine Lives," (Random House US$26), Dan Baum's absorbing, insightful look at the troubled recent history of New Orleans, began as a series of magazine articles for The New Yorker written around the time of Hurricane Katrina. As Baum makes clear, New Orleans confronted a slew of problems long before Katrina devastated the city in August 2005; it "was by almost any metric the worst city in the United States - the deepest poverty, the most murders, the worst schools, the sickest economy, the most brutal and corrupt cops."

Yet Baum also illustrates the profound cultural richness of New Orleans, showing us its powerful sense of community, its laid-back lifestyle, and its unique blending of rich and poor, black and white. Using the lives of nine residents, from different strata of the city, Baum conveys what makes New Orleans so special and so worth preserving. One example is Frank Minyard, a white doctor living in luxury who changes his playboy ways to help the city's poor.

The richness of Baum's research is everywhere on display. After hundreds of interviews and countless hours of on-site observation, he comes to understand New Orleans and love it. It is the contradictions of the city that are the most striking: "In New Orleans, no matter how much money you had in the bank, you looked on poverty every day."

Read the full story at The Boston Globe online.