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    Zeitoun
    Zeitoun
    Zeitoun
    Audiobook10 hours

    Zeitoun

    Written by Dave Eggers

    Narrated by Firdous Bamji

    4/5

    ()

    About this audiobook

    Dave Eggers is the New York Times best-selling author of the critically lauded A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius. Here he chronicles the Kafka-esque tribulations of Syrian-American Abdulrahman Zeitoun in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. His story is a moving testament to the resilience of the human spirit. "This is a beautiful book. Zeitoun is a poignant, haunting, ethereal story about New Orleans in peril." -Douglas Brinkley, New York Times best-selling author
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherRecorded Books, Inc.
    Release dateSep 18, 2009
    ISBN9781440774119
    Zeitoun
    Author

    Dave Eggers

    Dave Eggers is the founder of McSweeney’s, a quarterly journal and website (www.mcsweeneys.net), and his books include You Shall Know Our Velocity, How We Are Hungry, Short Short Stories, What is the What, and the bestselling A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius. His work has appeared in the New Yorker and Ocean Navigator. He is the recipient of the Addison Metcalf Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and was a 2001 finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. He lives in Northern California.

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    Reviews for Zeitoun

    4/5

    1,277 ratings124 reviews

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    • 4/5
      I think this book should be required reading. What an example of how badly wrong things can go during times of disaster and distress. The care that went into the writing of this book is evidenced by the narrative: strong, compelling and caring yet still journalistic. The pages and pages of cited references add heft to the facts within the book.
    • 4/5
      A little too long, but for interested readers who like to experience New Orleans after Katrina, this is as good as it gets. You follow a Syrian born American and his American wife , a true story reminding one of the fragility of one's freedom and the confidence in one's home country and it's rule of law,

      how easily all can be shattered.

      Gruesome, esp. when reading during the pandemic that will make history and we all not yet know how much we will loose in it's wake. Let us all pray together with Zeitoun to whatever higher power we like !!!!!
    • 5/5
      This is a wonderful work of narrative non-fiction focusing on an islamic family and the trails they face after Hurricane Katrina devastates New Orleans. Zeitoun decides to stay during the hurricane and subsequent flooding to help rescue his neighbors and watch over his property. He is arrested and accused of terrorism because of his Syrian decent, and is held without charges or due process in a maximum security prison for 28 days simply because his skin is brown. This is a shocking true story about how America failed to protect its citizens during a catastrophic time of need. Nice job Bush.
    • 5/5
      [Zeitoun] tells the story of a Muslim-American family in New Orleans. The mother and children leave for the store, while the husband stays behind. He and several other men are arrested and spend several months in various impromptu jail situations before being released. First, the story is very fast moving. The writing is crisp and informative without being dry. This was my first Eggers and I will definitely read more of his work. What [Zeitoun] manages to avoid is the pitfall of most post-Katrina books about New Orleans which is the forced insertion of every New Orleans personality, location, author’s favorite bar, food, and stereotype. Some of the characters and situations are recognizable to me because they read as real. This seems to be the case with the religious aspects as well, from my limited experience with Muslim-Americans.The story is hard and tragic and not entirely hopeful. It is the way life is – sometimes good, sometimes bad – and you do what you have to do to get by. Life in south Louisiana has been this way for a long time. Most people can tell you stories of their parents, grandparents, great-grandparents struggles. The stories are never disheartening and never heart-warming, but they are solid in a way that everyday life is. Perhaps there is a kind of hope in that.
    • 4/5
      "Zeitoun" is a non-fiction tale about the struggles of an extraordinary family during and after the Hurricane Katrina debacle in 2005. The story is told through the eyes of the husband and wife, alternating between their viewpoints, and is based on mountain heaps of research.Eggers mashes together multiple genres in this work, non-fiction, journalism, social justice, to create a strange hybrid of storybook and social justice tool. As the latter, it has worked wonders, topping charts, raising awareness as well as funds. As the former, it felt too smooth during the first half, and too dark during the second half. Overall, a high-quality piece of journalism.
    • 5/5
      History is brought alive through the straightforward writing style of Dave Eggers. No embellishments are necessary to create an atmosphere of doom. Just rewind the permanent etching in your memory bank if you were living in the United States during the late summer of 2005 when Hurricane Katrina roared up the Gulf coast creating mayhem.Abdul Zeitoun is a hardworking Syrian-American who is living the good life in New Orleans. He is a respectable business owner with a wife and four children who speaks with the wisdom of his deep-seated Islamic faith. He is a man who saw a need and gave of himself to fill it. The postapocalyptic streets of New Orleans become waterways where he makes his daily rounds of mercy in his battered canoe. This in itself is a great humanitarian tale, but what comes next is an outrage. The story takes a sudden turn and the horror becomes personalized. Things happened that made a major U.S. city seem more like a third world dictatorship. Katrina was a disaster in more ways than one. It brought out the best--and worst--in people. It is mind boggling to think how people were treated after they had lost so much.This is a riveting read and one that will have your emotions tied in knots. Yet the sheer goodness and gratitude of someone who appreciates life in all its forms makes this a book of eternal optimism.
    • 3/5
      This book was a speed read for me. I stayed up super late reading this and woke up in the morning desperately wanting to finish it. I liked the writing style but I felt that the flashbacks were a bit unnecessary and slowed the story down a bit too much. I had never heard Zeitoun's story and was completely appalled by the situation he was placed. I found it absolutely depressing to read about the recent news about him and his wife.
    • 4/5
      Great true story about a Syrian-American couple in New Orleans who encounter the real America in the aftermath of Katrina. Starts off a bit corny for my taste.
    • 5/5
      This book is an amazing and personal peek into the complex, contradictory, and oppressive machineries of power that continue to keep individuals in the world down. The structures of power occur at an almost molecular level - in the Deleuzian sense - in this book and are not even put into effect out of malevolence but, rather, through indifference, disinformation, and panic. This is a must-read book that shows how pressing it is to not forget the past decade's follies, panic, and terror as we move further forward with the optimism and hope that seems to be so prevalent right now.
    • 3/5
      I would have given this four stars, because it's interesting and well-written, but right after reading it I found out that Zeitoun has long behaved horribly to his (now ex-) wife. That doesn't justify his treatment by the authorities and it doesn't affect the fact that I enjoyed the book as I was reading it, but it surely has soured me on the book. Dave Eggers did a mountain of research on this book and had not a word about Zeitoun being in any way rough or worse with Kathy. Possibly he had some knowledge about it but covered it up? I think it's more likely that Eggars never realized it. But that doesn't give me any confidence in the thoroughness of the research and reporting then, that's for sure. If the book had only been about Zeitoun's experiences during and after the flood the omission might have been ok but an awful lot of the book was about their relationship -- so I feel kind of hoodwinked. Too bad.
    • 4/5
      Very good and heart-rending true story of a man caught up by circumstances around Katrina.
    • 5/5
      When people begin their journey to earn the title of ‘writer’ or ‘author’ the phrase they hear most is, “Write what you know.” So when Dave Eggers broke onto the literary scene he seemed to personify that motto with his memoir, A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius. Surely that title sounds a touch egotistical, but Eggers holds his own and backs it up with a tale of such candor, wit and humility that you can’t help agree with the given moniker.

      Since then, Eggers has gone on to expand his wordy sphere and he now has his own publishing house, McSweeney’s, and been the recipient of numerous awards and accolades. Yet the most interesting turn in his career seems to be his switch from talking about his own life story to detailing the lives of others, with the same skill and grace as before. His fictional works are also quite good, but Eggers is really at his finest when describing the trials and tribulations others have gone through, and that is what he tackles in his newest book, Zeitoun.

      Zeitoun is the story of a middle-aged Syrian-born man who stays behind to watch his house and business while his family retreats to safety in the face of the oncoming Hurricane Katrina. When he awakens to the true devastation being caused, Abdulrahman Zeitoun does what many people would not, he jumps in his canoe and begins rowing around his neighborhood helping people out of their homes, locating supplies for some, even feeding the local dogs trapped in their homes with no food or escape. While efforts like these should be commended with medals and keys to various cities, Zeitoun is awarded with an arrest by Federal officers, humiliation, degradation and unwarranted terrorist accusations based on nothing more than his race and the overwhelming chaos of the moment. Zeitoun becomes an unwilling disciple to the doctrine of fear and the corruption of unregulated power.

      The first half of the story lulls the reader into a comfortable state of being, where we celebrate the fact our country is a place where an immigrant like Zeitoun, a practicing Muslim, could arrive here, find love and build a successful business in one of our greatest cities, New Orleans. His early tales of the building of his family and work force can only be described as a true American triumph due to his sheer hard work and determination. Yet what follows is a horror story filled with not only the worst traits inside everyday people, but the nearly fatal flaws in our system of government and emergency response. The violations of Zeitoun’s civil rights, among many others, are painted with harsh strokes, dripping with the blood of a city washed backwards in time, to a wild west of roving gangs of looters and trigger-happy deputies, their fingers twitching as much from fear as excitement over their next capture.

      The scenes that come alive in this book are ones we believed lost to the annals of history and the atrocities committed on our soil in WWII. Yet the phrase we all know so well, but try so very hard to ignore, rears its head once more: “Those who cannot remember the past are doomed to repeat it.” [George Santayana, The Life of Reason Vol.1 1905]

      What we repeated here as a country was the unleashing of unbridled fear. After 9/11 we let fear of another terrorist attack rule every decision we made and we began a systematic shielding of each and every part of our society against these ghosts. We didn’t look at how far back that fear was pushing our country, how many of our own prized rights and privileges were being stripped away in order to ensure something that could never be proven or guaranteed. Eggers truly breaks it down as he says:

      This country was not unique. This country was fallible. Mistakes were being made. He was a mistake. In the grand scheme of the country’s blind, grasping fight against threats seen and unseen, there would be mistakes made. Innocents would be suspected. Innocents would be imprisoned.

      We chose to turn a blind eye to the rights of those innocents and many still do to this day. The combination of a nationwide catastrophe, like Katrina, and the well-touted doctrine of fear created the ultimate breeding ground for the travesty that Zeitoun was dragged through. We need to hear these stories and we need to remember these stories so we can protect our children and our fellow citizens from ever becoming one of these stories.

      There is a reason why this book is a national bestseller and named one of the best books of the year by the San Francisco Chronicle, Chicago Tribune, The New Yorker, The Guardian, The Huffington Post and many others. If you feel you can stomach the bitter and harsh truth of some of the things that happened outside the reach of the news cameras during Katrina, pick this up.
    • 5/5
      I have yet to read a report of Katrina/post-Katrina New Orleans that isn't heart-wrenching and enraging. This is another example.
    • 4/5
      This is a powerful and painful story to hear. Although, it starts off feeling a little slow, Eggers is just being meticulous about painting the picture and allowing us to fully know the Zeitoun family. Halfway through, suspense builds and the story becomes fascinating and horrifying. There were points that I actually wanted to stop reading it but at the same time I felt I needed to know what happened. This is a moving and gripping tale of the best and worst of people and America.
    • 4/5
      Zietoun (pronounced Zay-toon) and his wife Kathy lived in New Orleans when Hurricane Katrina hit. Zietoun ran a painting/consulting business. They had 4 kids at the time. Kathy evacuated with the kids and Zeitoun stayed behind to keep watch on his home, plus the rental properties that they owned. It wasn’t long before things got really bad for him, while Kathy couldn’t get ahold of him and had no idea what had happened... This was really good. There were a few parts – mostly Zietoun’s background in Syria – that I kind of lost focus, but the rest of it was really good. I did see a sort-of “spoiler” when I was only part-way through that I wish I hadn’t seen, though it wasn’t specifically about the storyline.
    • 4/5
      I loved this book! It really gave you a feel of what it was like after Hurricane Katrina.
    • 5/5
      I thought I knew everything there was to know about this hurricane but little did I know this book would be such an eyeopener. On the surface, this is the story about mega Hurricane Katrina, which in 2005 brought devastation to the city of New Orleans and it's residents, in particular a Syrian-American named Abdulraman Zeitoun and his family. Known as Zeitoun throughout the city for his dependable and conscientious painting and construction business and by his family as a loving, devoted father and stubborn workaholic he chose to stay in New Orleans and weather out the storm while his family left for higher ground.The storm raged and cleared, the flooding soon subsided but then...... the levees burst. Urged by this family to leave the city, Zeitoun again chose to stay. He was rescuing people and animals, surely it was God's will that he remain. Yet, the affects of another storm still had the country and government on edge, 9/11.What happens to Zeitoun in the days and weeks following Katrina reveal the fear, ineptitude and incompetence of a nation facing two catastrophes with little guidance and too much bureaucracy. Highly recommend.
    • 5/5
      Eggers is a master of weaving together various threads and bringing personalities to life--here, in this book set up primarily against the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, his talents are on full display. In focusing in on a single man and his family, Zeitoun tells the story of a family of New Orleans, taking us through their history, their separation during the storm, and the Kafka-esque days they faced after the storm passed. Pulling together everything from religion to racism, not to mention immigration and the socio-political forces at work at every turn, Eggers manages to bring to life not just the hurricane that ravaged New Orleans (which he does masterfully), but to bring to life a number of men and women who lived through it. The result is at turns heartbreaking and terrifying, though there's a fair bit of humor thrown in, and it's sometimes difficult to remember that this is a true history of a family and a storm, it reads so much like a suspenseful drama.I don't think this book can be compared to any other piece of nonfiction regarding immigration or natural disaster, because its scope is so wide and its detailing so careful, but there is no question that it is worth reading--perhaps now more than ever for US residents especially, considering the environmental and socio-political obstacles in the future.Absolutely recommended.
    • 4/5
      Part of me wishes I would have stopped reading at page 300. It's just sad. And the story gets more heartbreaking when I read how Zeitoun is doing today. The book is well written. I liked how the characters were developed including Zeitoun's childhood in Syria. It's fast-paced and hard to put down.
    • 4/5
      Looking for something about Katrina(the hurricane)? This is just the kind of ground-level, lived-through history I like best. Beautifully, engagingly, and simply written; Eggers makes it seem easy. Worth it for the opening paragraph alone.
    • 5/5
      Perhaps because of the cover, I assumed this was a fictional tale. It’s not, though I wish it were.

      Zeitoun tells the story of a resident of New Orleans resident, Abdulrahman Zeitoun, and his wife Kathy and children, in the midst and aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. It begins as a humanitarian tale, with Zeitoun staying behind in the family house to take care of it and elderly neighbors and pets in the hurricane and its aftermatch.

      But the story morphs as Zeitoun is detained in the days following Katrina, accused of being an Al Qaeda terrorist based on vague hysteria. The story is told from Abdulrahman’s experience as well as Kathy’s in his imprisonment. It is the stuff of a great action thriller, except that this story happened to one family of American citizens.
    • 4/5
      This account held my attention, perhaps because I hadn't previously read any personal accounts of someone who had been present during the Katrina hurricane disaster in New Orleans.Eggers focuses on one couple: Zeitoun and Kathy, beginning with scenes from their younger years which help us understand their strengths, values, and relationship. This is mixed in with events later, but each section is clearly identified by a date header so I had no difficulty following. We understand that Zeitoun's choice was rooted in his family history of being the best one can be, and that he had the skills and strength to remain behind and take care of his neighborhood and properties. And then events go madly awry as National Guardsmen assume he is a looter or worse, because of his Middle Eastern appearance.Some chapters give an overview of events while others go into the specific details so at times I felt like I had read something before, but that technique did help to reinforce important points.More than just an account of how a children and parents were affected by the separation caused by evacuation and the ways in which some rescue relief efforts were sidetracked by agendas of hate and greed, it is an exposition of how the US governmental system was incompetent in ensuring justice was carried out.
    • 5/5
      This is a very powerful book. I really can't say enough good things about it. Everyone should read it.
    • 4/5
      Put down Matterhorn to read this for BookClub. Interesting juxtaposition of the jungles of Vietnam and the 3rd world country New Orleans became in the aftermath of Katrina. You've heard the horror stories of Katrina, but this is one family's personal tale, and it is not pretty!
    • 5/5
      incredible. Nonfiction about aftermath of Katrina from the perspective of an Arab business owner who stayed behind to keep an eye on his rental properties and painting business. Wife and children had left for Texas and stayed at a "friend's" house. The friendship was strained due to 9/11 and the wife's decision (American) to become Muslim. The family left for other friends in AZ. Sometimes we Americans are not kind.
    • 4/5
      For the rest of the world, Hurricane Katrina and the aftermath of her horrible devastation are receding images in the rear view mirror; images replaced by other natural and man-made disasters of bigger and nastier proportions. To the rest of the world what happened in New Orleans is fast becoming a series of footnotes in history's troubled narrative. But, for the people of New Orleans, the nightmare is far from over. Zeitoun is just one man's story. A man who stayed to wait out the storm. A man who tried to help those in need wherever and however he could. A man caught up in racial profiling, prejudices, and fast-ignited bad judgements. There were hundred of stories just like his. Dave Eggers makes the story more interesting than run of the mill.
    • 2/5
      I just could not finish reading this knowing what I know about Zeitoun...every interaction between this couple captured by Eggers feels slimy and gross. Such a shame because I think Eggers is a great storyteller.
    • 4/5
      Not my favorite Eggers, but solid in its own right and a very manageable read. Paced more like fiction than non. This is a window into Hurricane Katrina through the perspective and experience of one particular family (and really the male head of the household at that). It's empathetic and warmly written, but it's one man/family's truth or personal account versus comprehensive or objective reporting. If you like your non-fiction more on the personal side and/or drawn to understand more deeply the impact of Katrina (or other natural disasters), this should make your list.
    • 2/5
      This book is nothing more than a hagiography, just an askew view of a man and a family in an effort to paint them as perfect cause that's the politically correct way.As much as Mr. Eggers brilliant writing permeates every page so do this hagiography inconsistencies (i.e. lies) every so often.The fact is that the hard working father that never takes a vacation, as we are told in a quite elaborate couple of pages, we later find out, in the same book, goes on vacation for as long, and as far (Spain, Syria) as anybody else.The quaint mom&pop small business run from home, is not really run from home but from an office in a dedicated building and is not so small as it has at least a dozen workers at any time and a side real state operation. So kudos to them but it's insulting being told for the first 50 or 100 pages one cute little story only to discover the contradicting facts further along.And in the middle of the constant hammering about the purity and sanctity of this Muslim family somehow is ok for them to become racists themselves and discriminate about other nationalities/religions based on just rumors and personal bias ... as in this lovely little passage:"That was it, she realized. Her husband was an Arab, and there were Israeli paramilitaries on the ground in the city."As it happens so many times the author could have sticked to reality and come out of it with a really good book, as the breakdown of the judicial system was very much as real and terrible as he describes but his pink shaded glasses and political correctness blindness make this a biased account of the facts.
    • 5/5
      A Syrian man, Zeitoun, decides to ride out Hurricane Katrina, at his home in New Orleans. He is a contractor and has several rental units around town. His wife and children leave town for safety's sake. This book chronicles his experience preparing for the storm, during and post-hurricane. Very, very good. Demonstrates how ill prepared FEMA was and how it effected Zeitoun, as well as others.