Alaska Employment Law

Zeitoun, by David Eggers.

When Hurricane Katrina struck New Orleans, a certain prosperous and well-regarded painting contractor, a father of four, chose to stay through the storm to protect his house and contracting business.  His wife and children, at his urging, fled the city.  In the days after, he traveled the flooded streets in a secondhand canoe, passing on supplies and helping those he could.  The man even took thawing steaks from his own freezer and brought them to starving abandoned dogs trapped on the upper floors of flooded neighborhood residences.  Then, on September 6, 2005, he abruptly disappeared.

His name is Abdulrahman Zeitoun, and Dave Eggers has written a biography of him that explores Zeitoun’s roots in Syria, his marriage to Kathy — an American who converted to Islam — and their children, and the surreal atmosphere in New Orleans and the United States generally in which what happened to Mr. Zeitoun became possible.  It is a horrifying story, made more amazing by Mr. Zeitoun’s response to what happened to him.

I finished reading Zeitoun in Budapest, far from the government that was not so unprepared for Hurricane Katrina as you might have thought, a government not prepared to help the victims of Katrina so much as to round up and imprison (you guessed it) terrorists thought somehow to be exploiting the disaster.  As an Amazon reviewer notes, “Mr. Zeitoun is a kind and gentle man.  His signs are ubiquitous in New Orleans and he is a stranger to no one and well liked by all who have met him. That he could be mistreated is a crime and an outrage. That others were rounded up and treated even worse is one of the worst black eyes on our country. As I read this book I just kept saying out loud over and over again, ‘This cannot be America.’ ”

Zeitoun is the best book I read all year, bar none.  Read it.   (The description above borrows from The McSweeney’s Store website.)

Beg, Borrow, Steal: A Writer’s Life, by Michael Greenberg, consists of about 45 short essays (four pages seems to be the limit) written for the London Times Literary Supplement from 2003 to 2009.  Greenberg, a struggling, thoroughly impoverished writer in New York for many years, writes with a certain equanimity about his failures.  He eventually achieved noteworthy though perhaps bittersweet success with Hurry Down Sunshine: A Father’s Story of Love and Madness, a book about the mental difficulties of his daughter.  The son of a non-literary Jewish immigrant father who ran both the family and the family business (a metal scrap yard) like a tyrant, Greenberg writes with empathy, concision, and self-deprecation, with a keen vision of life in the boroughs of New York City.  Beg, Borrow, Steal is a good book, and because of the essay form, easy to pick up and delve into – though I could hardly put it down.