Through the story of one man’s experience after Hurricane Katrina, Eggers draws an indelible picture of Bush-era crisis management. Abdulrahman Zeitoun, a successful Syrian-born painting contractor, decides to stay in New Orleans and protect his property while his family flees. After the levees break, he uses a small canoe to rescue people, before being arrested by an armed squad and swept powerlessly into a vortex of bureaucratic brutality. When a guard accuses him of being a member of Al Qaeda, he sees that race and culture may explain his predicament. Eggers, compiling his account from interviews, sensibly resists rhetorical grandstanding, letting injustices speak for themselves. His skill is most evident in how closely he involves the reader in Zeitoun’s thoughts. Thrown into one of a series of wire cages, Zeitoun speculates, with a contractor’s practicality, that construction of his prison must have begun within a day or so of the hurricane.

Images of Katrina

As you read Zeitoun, you may enhance your experience by viewing the remarkable images of the disaster, featured in the websites below:

• The New York Times has an interactive site that shows photos chronologically, day by day of the disaster:

http://www.nytimes.com/packages/khtml/2005/08/30/national/20050830_STORM_FEATURE.html

• The Ogden Museum mounted an exhibit of the best photojournalism of Katrina marking the fifth anniversary:

http://tellingtheirstories.com/exhibit/the-photos/

• This site, from the University of Southern Mississippi, has a slideshow of kids’ art by young survivors:

http://www.usm.edu/afterkatrina/multimedia2/Katrina_artwork.html