Book description
In August, 2005, as Hurricane Katrina blew in, the city of New
Orleans had been abandoned by most citizens. But resident Abdulrahman
Zeitoun, though his wife and family had gone, refused to leave. For
days he traversed an apocalyptic landscape of flooded streets by
canoe. He protected neighbours' properties, fed trapped dogs and
rescued survivors. But eventually he came to the attention of those
'guarding' this drowned city. Only then did Zeitoun's nightmare really begin.
Zeitoun is the powerful, ultimately uplifting true story of
one man's courage when confronted with an awesome force of nature
followed by more troubling human oppression.
Dave Eggers is the author of six previous books, including
What is
the What
, a finalist for the 2006 National Book Critics Circle Award and winner
of France's Prix Medicis Etranger. Eggers is the founder and editor of
McSweeney's, an independent publishing house based in San Francisco. In
2002, he co-founded 826 National, a network of nonprofit writing and
tutoring centers for youth throughout the United States. As a
journalist, Eggers's work has appeared in the
New Yorker
, the
New York Times
,
Time
, and
Esquire
. In 2004, Eggers taught at the University of California-Berkeley
Graduate School of Journalism, and there he cofounded Voice of Witness,
a series of books using oral history to illuminate human rights crises
around the world.
