Feature Title
Zeitoun
by Dave Eggers
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 travelled 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 U.S., Spain, and Syria.
About the Author
Dave Eggers is the author of four books: A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, You Shall Know Our Velocity!, How We are Hungry, and What is the What. He is the editor of McSweeney’s and is co-founder of 826 Valencia, a network of nonprofit writing and tutoring centers for young people. As a journalist, his work has appeared in The New Yorker, Esquire, and The Believer. In 2004 he co-taught a class at the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism, out of which grew the Voice of Witness series of books, designed to illuminate contemporary human crises through oral history. The first in the series, Surviving Justice: America’s Wrongfully Convicted and Exonerated, was published in 2005. Voices from the Storm, about the residents of New Orleans who survived Hurricane Katrina, was published in 2006. He lives in San Francisco, CA with his wife and children.
Reviews
"While much outrage has been focused on the lack of federal response to the flood, the Zeitouns’ story puts front and centre the nightmare response the government actually came up with. By turning a humanitarian disaster into a military operation with National Guard troops frazzled from Afghanistan and Iraq, war was brought home. Yes, there are faxes in which the government literally warns that terrorists would be likely to operate during a hurricane. One hopes that with Zeitoun, any debate about the ways in which Eggers chooses to tell stories is put to rest. Let's just be glad that they're being told. " --Eye Weekly
$30.95 Cloth, 342 pp
978-1-934781-63-0
McSweeney's