When I read Zeitoun last year I thought it was the best among many many Katrina-related books published in the wake of the flood. I wrote about it at the time in a post which you should be able to find by clicking here. But I've noticed lately that the Yellow Blog archives are acting kind of screwy and so any posts that happen in the first five days of any month are liable to end up hidden from view for some reason. But I can still go back and find them so I'll rescue this one bit.
In Zeitoun, Dave Eggers relays the story of local painter and contractor Abdulrahman Zeitoun who stayed behind during the Federal Flood to watch over his home and some of the properties he owned around town. Zeitoun spent the first few days after the storm traveling the city in a canoe, rescuing people from flooded buildings, and feeding abandoned animals until he (along with three other men) was abducted from his own building by armed security personnel and locked up at the "Camp Greyhound" temporary prison constructed in the Union Passenger Terminal.
When I read Zeitoun this summer, it made me very angry. But, like Clio, I was grateful to see this story told so well by Eggers. Zetioun stands among a very small number of "Katrina" books that manage to tell a real story about real people without falling back on ornamental cliches or guilt-driven defensive rationalizations about "Why New Orleans Matters". Instead, Zeitoun simply assumes the reader will understand that the people here "matter" because they are people. The fact that the events reported upon constitute a violation of that assumption makes the horror of it all that much more poignant.
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