Customer Reviews

Zeitoun

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This reminds us of how bizarrely the aftermath of hurricane Katrina was handled. I recommend this for anyone who didn't believe that relief effort and emergency measures were poorly managed - it'll change your mind. Plus, it's written as touching and real narrative about a family whose struggles are real. Very good book.

It's a story that starts out mundane and ordinary, we go from the fairly dull to the intriguing to the humdinger of an expose. Eggers does a fantastic job of disappearing into the crazy, unbelievable story of Kathy and Abdulrahman Zeitoun during the flooding of New Orleans. The full spectrum of humanity is on display here, from the small acts of kindness which are really not so small, to the large scale amoral insanity that is destroying the modern world. Excellent stuff, one of the best reads this year without a doubt, possibly the best. (And honestly, I didn't know Eggers had a book named "What's the real What" when I picked up Zeitoun.)

This is a fantastic book, my best of read in some time, bar none. It's compelling both in its story and in the telling. Mr. Eggers obviously spent many long hours interviewing the main characters of this story, Abdulrahman Zeitoun and his wife Kathy and he provides a deep insight into their characters. Not the biographies of Jon Krakauer, we begin with a mystery. A man is imprisoned without the usual rights associated with habeas corpus we would normally associate with the United States and any country that pretends to be civilized for basically trying to be a good citizen and do what he believed God intended for him. Like the prisons in Guantanamo Bay, he is caged in what was a Greyhound parking lot and then transported to an overcrowded prison where he discovers his charge and is unable to contact his wife who he knows must believe he is dead. How can this happen? We learn about his home in Syria, his journey through the high seas and finally his reasons for settling in his current home of New Orleans. Then, we are given details about his dedication to his work and family and his reasons for staying in the cursed city despite the desperate pleading from his wife and brother. How could such atrocities happen to such a man? We are given no answer however we are given insight into one of the tremendous individuals that America have now been blessed its soil and the crazy suspicions that continue to plague them.

In my opinion, "Zeitoun" is possibly the best non-fiction book I've read this year. Dave Eggers, a modern day Dickens according to the New York Times' Timothy Egan, is a journalistic wizard weaving through the background of Abdulrahman Zeitoun -- a Syrian immigrant -- his family and life in New Orleans, and his adventures during the unfortunate events of Hurricane Katrina.

The first half of the book admittedly is slightly dull, but the second half is both thrilling but profoundly tragic at the same time. I don't want to give up the plot but it will have you questioning the fragility of the constitutional rights (as Americans that is) and what it means to be an American.

Unfortunately, there are probably many more Zeitoun stories yet to be told, each one as sad as the one before. As a cathartic process, I believe these stories all need to be told, if only so that somehow in the future, we can avoid repeating such terrible mistakes. When will we ever learn??

The best book I've read all year. Zeitoun is a harrowing personal tale of what it means to be good when faced with bad. Our hero (an understatement), Zeitoun, is a Syrian-born naturalized American who lived in New Orleans during Katrina. While his family bolts to Baton Rogue and later, Phoenix, he stays in the city to watch over his home and other rental properties. He ends up saving lives (human and animals) and is rewarded by being wrongfully arrested and sent to a maximum-security prison. Through Zeitoun's story, FEMA's bureaucratic ineptitude is realized as well as the abundant character flaws within general America.

I knew Zeitoun was about post-Katrina New Orleans, and knew I liked Dave Eggers' writing, and that was enough for me to read it. I had no inkling of anything else to do with the book.

That said, it was a truly devastating read, and one that I'm still thinking about a week after finishing it. I read it in one day, and was unable to put it down. The writing is, in places, not Eggers' strongest work, in my opinion. I was too aware of his presence as a narrator, and was taken out of the story by his voice a few times in the beginning, but eventually he hit his stride and I became engrossed.

It's a terrifying story, made moreso by the fact that it's true, and it happened, and very recently. The book made clear that our society, with its heat, hot water, light, relative security...is extremely precarious, and held together by a series of important factors that, once missing, cause the collapse of the system. The flood waters made driving impossible. They killed phone lines, electricity. The worst people in society took immediate advantage, looting, stealing, victimizing, and the best people in society, like Zeitoun, were lumped in with them when the powers that be - military, government, police - panicked, realized they were losing control, and with no plan in place, began randomly imprisoning people.

It's a terrible story, in that those in power abused their power so thoroughly, partially through fear, I'm sure, as to destroy so much faith. But it's a beautiful story, too, in the simple acts of kindness that those without any real power at all, Zeitoun especially, chose to stay and bestow. People do help each other. There is good.

Often the stories that make us feel the most, the ones most memorable are fictitious, imagined, about people who never were and yet who live so much more real in your mind's eye, springing as they do grotesque-evil or salt-of-the-earth-beautiful off that page.

The true stories we read, while generally stimulating often fall short somehow. I'd argue this is because news reportage and less crafted non-fiction typically stick so closely to the "facts" they bypass the feelings behind them. Writers of literary fiction, on the other hand, focus much of their attention on the reaction to events, rather than on the events themselves. The now very in-fashion genre that bridges the gap, that Truman Capote made famous with his utterly brilliant "In Cold Blood," is often termed literary non-fiction. That is, a true story written not by a person that can type, but rather by one who has spent the better part of their life learning how to write.

"Zeitoun" is a book of literary non-fiction. As such, it's a gripping story and it is also beautiful, the kind of book you feel proud to own.

With the kind of simplicity that only a master craftsman can achieve (the 10,000 hours +++ or, in writing terms, the more than 1,000,000 words it takes), Dave Eggers' "Zeitoun" manages, like a world class film composer's score that you don't notice it is so seamlessly thread through the film, to make this true story strictly about Abdulrahman Zeitoun, a Syrian-American man who remains in New Orleans during Katrina and afterward. The writing doesn't once point the finger back at the artist, at Eggers, who is, by now, a massive literary personality in his own right. It takes a good deal of ego to become a master of anything, and a great deal of humility to then cut down and spit-shine your writing so hard as to wipe off any of that egotistical grease you might be tempted to leave behind.

Plain, direct and with my favourite kind of simplicity (the Hemingway-made-famous deceptive kind), what makes this story so compelling is that not only do we get the immediacy of the Katrina debacle as seen through the eyes of a man who lived through it, but as with any heroic story, we get the kind of intimacy that only a book - in novelistic story sense - can provide, spending a few hundred tense yet often tender pages with Zeitoun; we get to know his family, his wife Kathy, an American who converted to Islam before she met her husband (itself a fascinating tangential story that Eggers is clever enough to slow down and tell in detail).

Like reading any great story about any great hero from a world not our own, like reading about a family from India, or a book about a young Jewish man coming of age in Montreal, this work of non-fiction brings us on side with a heroic Muslim man, which seems to me like fair retribution - this kind of empathy inducing tale - when considering the post 9/11 treatment so many Muslim-Americans, and, for that matter, all brown skinned Americans have had to endure in the paranoid post 9/11 world.

"Zeitoun" would be a fascinating story no matter who told it, but with Eggers at the helm, you get a great story told with economy, humility and with the killer critical element - the ability to take you, for instance, onto that metal canoe with Abdulraman, so that you paddle down the streets of New Orleans with him, so that you endure all that follows with him. So that you too can know what this storm did and what abhorrent actions the Bush administration took, and what critical ones they were foolish and heartless enough not to take.

Great imagination is rooted, they say, in empathy. For years I mulled this one over not exactly sure what it meant. I can articulate it now, after having read this powerful story. Eggers digs deep into the life experience that one family endures and in so doing allows us to live those experiences with him. The best books don't just let us escape, nor is it just that they make us think; it is the feeling, it's the empathy that's key because if we don't get to care deeply about the characters involved, why complete five pages of the thing.

I completed 335, and fast.

-Bookworm, Movie Nerd