351 pages
English language
Published April 15, 2009 by McSweeney's Books.
Zeitoun is a nonfiction book written by Dave Eggers and published by McSweeney's in 2009. It tells the story of Abdulrahman Zeitoun, the Syrian-American owner of a painting and contracting company in New Orleans, Louisiana, who chose to ride out Hurricane Katrina in his Uptown home. After the hurricane, he traveled the flooded city in a secondhand canoe rescuing neighbors, caring for abandoned pets and distributing fresh water, but was arrested without reason or explanation at one of his rental houses, along with three others, by a mixed group of U.S. Army National Guard soldiers and local police officers. Zeitoun and the others were accused of terrorist activities, presumably because of the large amount of money found in their possession as well as maps of the city and a storage disc, and were detained for 23 days. Zeitoun was refused medical attention and the use of a phone to alert …
Zeitoun is a nonfiction book written by Dave Eggers and published by McSweeney's in 2009. It tells the story of Abdulrahman Zeitoun, the Syrian-American owner of a painting and contracting company in New Orleans, Louisiana, who chose to ride out Hurricane Katrina in his Uptown home. After the hurricane, he traveled the flooded city in a secondhand canoe rescuing neighbors, caring for abandoned pets and distributing fresh water, but was arrested without reason or explanation at one of his rental houses, along with three others, by a mixed group of U.S. Army National Guard soldiers and local police officers. Zeitoun and the others were accused of terrorist activities, presumably because of the large amount of money found in their possession as well as maps of the city and a storage disc, and were detained for 23 days. Zeitoun was refused medical attention and the use of a phone to alert his family. His wife and daughters, who were staying with friends far away from the city, only learned that he had disappeared.
Knowing how this story ends in real life after the book (if you don't, don't look it up!) distracted me a bit, and also, reading it in 2018 in the era of Trump and the border wall and Kaepernick and police violence also changes its meaning form when I had read it earlier.
But it remains a harrowing account of profiling and bureaucracy a modern-day Kafka surely worth a read.
The portrait that the book paints is of a New Orleans left to fend for itself, with the National Guard brought in as a force of occupation, rather than a search-and-rescue operation. But there was official s-a-r going on in the city, and was most of what law enforcement was doing. Even if Zeitoun managed to not notice the house to house searches going on, he most certainly had an official place to take his own rescuees. I'm afraid that all of the paranoia-mongering in the book could be more easily explained by the rampart corruption at the local level, and the gross ineptitude of FEMA. But that's all very old news.
Not an easy read. One that can lead to outrage, even. I personally didn't need any more convincing that FEMA was utterly incompetent, but sometimes it helps to have personal stories instead of statistics. And they haven't always …
The portrait that the book paints is of a New Orleans left to fend for itself, with the National Guard brought in as a force of occupation, rather than a search-and-rescue operation. But there was official s-a-r going on in the city, and was most of what law enforcement was doing. Even if Zeitoun managed to not notice the house to house searches going on, he most certainly had an official place to take his own rescuees. I'm afraid that all of the paranoia-mongering in the book could be more easily explained by the rampart corruption at the local level, and the gross ineptitude of FEMA. But that's all very old news.
Not an easy read. One that can lead to outrage, even. I personally didn't need any more convincing that FEMA was utterly incompetent, but sometimes it helps to have personal stories instead of statistics. And they haven't always been incompetent. Before they were sucked into Homeland Security they actually managed to help people. But now the only way to get help is to somehow tie natural disasters to terrorism.
Exceptionally good book profiling a man who stayed behind as Katrina struck, paddled around his underwater city to see who he could help, and then was arrested for looting (on his own property), held in a cage with other prisoners without due process of any kind, and finally sent to a prison by order of FEMA, which incarcerated him for vague national security reasons. (He is a Muslim from Syria.) Playing an equally important role is his wife Kathy and their three daughters; though she was able to keep in touch with him for days after the hurricane, she had no way of knowing he had been taken into custody and feared the worst, a traumatic experience that has taken a toll. Eggers does an amazing job of evoking the mystery of a city submerged and lets this remarkable story tell itself in simple, no-nonsense, affecting prose. I enjoyed getting …
Exceptionally good book profiling a man who stayed behind as Katrina struck, paddled around his underwater city to see who he could help, and then was arrested for looting (on his own property), held in a cage with other prisoners without due process of any kind, and finally sent to a prison by order of FEMA, which incarcerated him for vague national security reasons. (He is a Muslim from Syria.) Playing an equally important role is his wife Kathy and their three daughters; though she was able to keep in touch with him for days after the hurricane, she had no way of knowing he had been taken into custody and feared the worst, a traumatic experience that has taken a toll. Eggers does an amazing job of evoking the mystery of a city submerged and lets this remarkable story tell itself in simple, no-nonsense, affecting prose. I enjoyed getting to know this man and his extended family, though what happened to him and to the city of New Orleans was an appalling miscarriage of justice and a lapse of simple humanity.
I heart Dave Eggers.
