Summaries and Customer Reviews are supplied by Amazon.com
Summary:
When Hurricane Katrina struck New Orleans, Abdulrahman Zeitoun, a prosperous Syrian-American and father of four, chose to stay through the storm to protect his house and contracting business. In the days after the storm, he traveled the flooded streets in a secondhand canoe, passing on supplies and helping those he could. A week later, on September 6, 2005, Zeitoun abruptly disappeared. Eggers’s riveting nonfiction book, three years in the making, explores Zeitoun’s roots in Syria, his marriage to Kathy — an American who converted to Islam — and their children, and the surreal atmosphere (in New Orleans and the United States generally) in which what happened to Abdulrahman Zeitoun was possible. Like What Is the What, Zeitoun was written in close collaboration with its subjects and involved vast research — in this case, in the United States, Spain, and Syria.
Customer Reviews:
Average Customer Rating:
Very Well Written
Customer Rating:
This book is very well written - presenting a very compelling story in a factual manner.
unexpectedly powerful and moving
Customer Rating:
Although this book is listed on its cover as a "best seller", I came across it quite by accident, while searching for another book. Then I read some reviews, bought the book, and began reading it "between books", or so I thought. To my wonderment and to my very pleasant surprise, it's a riveting book, one which I found almost impossible to put down. It reads like the very best of adventure stories interwoven with the very best of crime fiction - and even that's inadequate praise for this highly entertaining and educational book.
"Zeitoun" adds a very personal viewpoint and a powerful depth to the thousands of individual struggles and tragedies of the aftermath of the hurricane Katrina. It also points out things which we never read in the mass media - the over-reliance on high technology which probably cost lives, the incredible insensitivity of too many people at all levels (but in this book, mostly at lower and intermediate levels of the military and police forces). I had not known how many "indpendent security contractors" like members of the now infamous "Blackwater" firm, the Israeli Mossad, and others were flown to New Orleans to provide "security". I had not known how many thousands of guns were imported into the city after the floods. I hadn't realized how inflated were the reports of random citizen violence. I had some idea of the insensitivity and brutality of the security forces themselves, but the extent of it surprised me as I read the book.
As a member of a multi-ethnic family, I felt a particular concern for the plight of the muslims in particular (Abdulrahman Zeitoun is a Syrian born American citizen) but also with all the "people of color" and the less financially well off, who suffered disproportionally in the haphazard efforts to stabilize the city and salvage some of its people.
But "Zeitoun" is not all gloom and doom. It's a story of resilience, survival, and hope - sometimes against the odds.
Even in 2009, years after the hurricane itself, "Zeitoun" is a compelling story, and a very topical one. Don't start reading this book late at night, because once you start, it will be very difficult to stop.
Bill Hansen
eggers does journalistic narrative reporting
Customer Rating:
eggers has been in my top-10 authors, mostly for his not-quite-nonfiction books; so i was intrigued to read this hurricane katrina nonfiction (without any fictionalizing). it doesn't have the wit that eggers brings into even dark stories elsewhere. but the story itself is so remarkable (i had to remind myself it wasn't fictionalized). this is a "how does this happen in this country?" story. i felt like i was exercising stewardship by reading it.
Essential Reading
Customer Rating:
This book should be required reading for all American citizens -- and certainly for all American schoolchildren for many years to come. It is an important story of how government neglect and the rollback of hard won civil liberties can touch the life an "ordinary" person. Of course, Zeitoun is not ordinary. He is extraordinary for his perseverance through the trials he encounters in this extraordinary book.
on second thought
Customer Rating:
I liked reading this book about a hard working, honest, family guy who got into some trouble after Katrina. I think the author wanted us to have sympathy to the main character and his family, and I had this when i finished the book. However, upon thinking about it, I realized that the Zeiton guy had it pretty good, and his troubles were not so bad. He was caught in an area he should not have been, and was put in jail. He got out of jail a lot quicker than other New Orleans people. The only abuse he got for being Arabic was that some jailers and military guys called him names like "Taliban" or "al-kaeda". I hope Eggers did not want to put the USA down, because if this Zeitoun guy was caught doing something wrong in Syria, Saudi Arabia, or Egypt, he would have suffered a lot worse. It is obvious that Zeitoun does not want to go back to those Islamic countries, and in his next book, Eggers should tell us why this is so.
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