Zeitoun

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 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.