Hey, you know what? You're going to get a book! Really!
You're going to get and read this book despite the fact that it will sadden and enrage you. Despite the fact that it's just come out you'll have to shell out hardback prices. Heck, you're going to get it despite the fact that I'm about to tell you a whole lot of the plot and a key element of the story.
Don't worry, you'll have your reasons.
The book is a work of non-fiction called Zeitoun and it was written by the enormously talented author and editor Dave Eggers, whose early work for Salon.com and first book "A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius," brought him instant acclaim.
It is the story of Abdulrahman Zeitoun, his wife Kathy, their families, their neighbors, their business, the city where they live and their country's government at a time of crisis and crossroads.
Zeitoun grew up in Jableh, a small fishing town on the Syrian coast and, like his older brother Ahmad, he took to the sea as a young man, crewing freighters around the world, strolling distant shores, encountering new cultures and languages, and relishing the pure freedom only a young seaman can know.
In 1988, he helped deliver a tanker of Saudi oil to the port of Houston and decided to stay for a while in America, using the construction skills he'd learned before going off to sea. Before too long, he met Kathy, a Baton Rouge native who had converted to Islam after a brief first marriage. After a long, cautious courtship, the two were married and, with Kathy's son Zachary, began a family.
Settling in New Orleans, the Zeitouns founded a painting and contracting company that soon grew to be successful and respected, employing dozens of painters, carpenters and laborers. Their family also grew, as Kathy gave birth to three daughters. Aside from their own home, they bought and renovated rental properties in the Uptown and Broadmoor neighborhoods.
By the early 21st century, Zeitoun was a respected and admired member of his community. He'd built or renovated so many of his neighbors' homes, they'd come to trust and depend on him, never hesitating to leave their keys in his hands.
He was hardworking and upright with a drive to do right, and it was frustrating but not surprising to his wife that, in August of 2005 when a major hurricane was bearing down on the city, Zeitoun elected to stay and look after his and his neighbors' properties, sending Kathy and the children to stay with her family in Baton Rouge. She thought he was crazy, as did his brother Ahmad, now living in Spain, but Zeitoun thought he'd be able to do some good.
And thus began Zeitoun's greatest and most terrifying adventure.
The storm blew ashore Monday, August 29, damaging roofs, breaking windows and uprooting trees, but by Tuesday night, it had proved to be as inconsequential as Zeitoun had predicted, and he wasn't shy about telling Kathy and Ahmad "I told you so" over his cell phone. The foot or so of water in his neighborhood had been pumped away and he set about early repairs on the house.
The next morning, he awoke from old dreams of the sea to find one growing around his house. The levees had failed.
Zeitoun spent the day dragging books, electronics and furniture upstairs, prepping the second-hand canoe he'd bought a few years before, and setting up a tent on the flat roof of his garage, to have someplace to sleep cooler than his sweltering, unairconditioned house. In the coming days, he paddled around Uptown, Broadmoor and Mid-City, rescuing trapped people, feeding abandoned dogs, checking on his friends, neighbors, business and properties. One of his rental houses, on Claiborne Avenue, even had a working landline, enabling him to keep in touch with Ahmad and Kathy after his cell phone had died.
Checking on the Islamic Student Center at Tulane University, he found his friend Nasser, who'd gone to the relatively dry campus to stay, but returned to Zeitoun's house with him to help with his rounds and enjoy company, security and fast-thawing freezer food.
Kathy and the kids were feeling cramped with her family in Baton Rouge, who had never really accepted her conversion to Islam, and set out for Phoenix, where she planned to stay with her oldest childhood friend Yuko, another American convert. Daily, she continued to beg Zeitoun to get out of the city, which news reports depicted as falling into chaos. Ahmad, too, in daily calls from Spain to the Claiborne house, urged him to evacuate.
But Zeitoun felt he was doing a good work, something his God had called him to. He kept up his daily routine, looking after the neighbors, the dogs, making the calls from the Claiborne house. Until, one afternoon, a flatboat filled with unidentified police and National Guard, their insignia obscured by tac vests, came to the Claiborne house and took Zeitoun, Nasser, Zeitoun's tenant at Claiborne Todd and Ronnie, a man who'd moved in, downtown to the Union Passenger Terminal.
Zeitoun was not surprised. Mayor Nagin had just ordered a mandatory evacuation of the city and Zeitoun had stayed long after it was time to leave. Zeitoun figured they were going to be evacuated by bus or train to the airport or to Baton Rouge. Instead, they were stripped, cavity-searched, fingerprinted and marched at gunpoint outside, behind the station, where a newly-built chain link and concertina wire kennel for humans awaited. Zeitoun's new home was what the soldiers were calling Camp Greyhound.
For days, they sat or lay on the the asphalt in an open cage, pleading for a lawyer, a charge, a phone call. They were answered only by shouts, by the sight of prisoners in other cages randomly pepper gassed and, curiously, by accusations that they were "Taliban" and "al Qaeda." After a few days, they were taken out and loaded on a bus to St. Gabriel, where they were salted away, still uncharged and incommunicado, in a maximum-security prison.
And that's about all I'll tell you now, save to share with you a link that Kathy found much later, to a memo prepared long before Katrina by the Department of Homeland Security, the CIA and others. It war-games the possibility that, in the wake of a major hurricane hitting the US, terrorists might exploit confusion and diminished law-enforcement to stage an attack.
Which explains so much about what happened here that, before, seemed simply the result of incompetence or petty turf wars. Why did Bush push Blanco so hard for federal control of the Guard? Why was Blackwater patrolling our streets long after the flood and return? Why were starving, desperate US citizens met not with open hands but with locked and loaded weapons?
Because in the world made by Dick Cheney's grasping paranoia and John Ashcroft's self-aggrandizing smugness and Donald Rumsfeld's casual viciousness and George W. Bush's incurious pliability, even the simple act of reaching out to help a devastated city became an exercise in fear and demonization. Because, to them, we were all terrorists.
There's a joke you hear from some street weary and cynical cops: there's three kinds of people--cops, perps and suspects. To the people in charge of America, that summed up the whole country. Only without the suspects.
Reversing that universal suspicion, rooting out that black worm of fear, is the greatest task that lies before us now. Reforming health care, halting climate change, bringing our soldiers home from a war that never should have been fought, bringing my freaking neighbors home from their four-year exile in Houston, those are biggies. But excising that worm from the hearts of what once was the most open, generous people in the world tops the list.
So, you might want to get this book to find out what happened to Zeitoun and Kathy. Or you might want to get it to treat yourself to Eggers' flawless telling of their story, in which he achieves what so many writers strive for and so many others don't even know they should: the utterly invisible narrator. You might want to get it to read the Zeitouns' experience, told in such observant detail as to take you into their skins, of the reality of being a smart, compassionate Muslim in post-9/11 America. Those are pretty good reasons.
You might just want to get the book to offer a little personal recompense to the man and his family for all they've been through, or even to Eggers for telling their story so perfectly, or to the publisher for putting it on paper.
That wouldn't be a very good reason, though, as the Zeitoun family and Eggers and McSweeney's are all channelling the proceeds from this book to the foundation the Zeitouns started, assisting non-profits working to rebuild New Orleans---and the trust and generosity of the American people. Here's a list of the organization they'll be donating to so far.
Maybe that's a good enough reason to get the book?