Dave Eggers is my favorite living writer. I have nothing negative to say, and there is not one thing I would want to change anything he has ever written. All of his books have surprised and challenged me while reading them. His previous book titled, “What is the What” was his most challenging. It came out soon after the movie Hotel Rwanda, a film that made me none too exited for more true stories of mass slaughter in modern Africa. So I set the book aside for over a year, until I was ready to trudge through 475 pages of what was sure to be unbearably sad material. Had the book been written by Thomas Hardy, Art Spiegelman, or the screenwriters of Hotel Rwanda, I probably would have wanted to do myself in after forty pages. In Dave Eggers’ capable hands though, and witnessing the events through the eyes of the brilliant, resilient real life protagonist, Valentino Achak Deng, the story retained a hopeful sense through out. It skillfully balanced color and beauty alongside its brutality, without sugarcoating, cheapening, or glossing over the any of the events. My admiration of Dave Eggers skyrocketed after reading that book, and made me hungry for any of his future projects.

I went to buy his latest book, “Zeitoun” the day it was to be released. Like “What is the What” it is a true story about a family’s struggles in the aftermath of hurricane Katrina in New Orleans. Again it is emotionally devastating material, but encouraged by his previous book I didn’t need time to prepare, I dove right into it. The book is told through the eyes of Abdulrahman and Kathy Zeitoun. Their love story and the history of their families are almost as interesting as the astonishing, and disgraceful events that they endured in the aftermath of Katrina. I won’t spoil any of those details though. It’s otherworldly, it’s topsy-turvey, and it happened here in the modern USA. Dave Eggers has told it all compellingly and beautifully, and be it in the author’s nature or in the personalities of the subjects, no matter how hopeless and shameful things became there always remained flickers of hope.

For me this harsh story was bearable because of the skilled writing, because of the love story, and because of the protagonists’ decency and religious faith. I’m a stone-cold-skeptic, so I am almost never able to deeply relate to people’s faiths, but surprisingly I did with Abdulrahman and Kathy Zeitoun, who are both Muslims. The book told of both of their journeys to the Islamic faith, and I was enthralled by it all. It illustrated matter-of-factly how their faith helped them endure, in the same way Valentino’s Christian faith helped him, which I connected to in that book as well. Dave Eggers has pulled an incredible feat in getting this atheist to deeply connect to such very different people and their religions. It didn’t bring me to faith in any way, but allowed me to connect to it. That and many other things in these wonderful books brought me to tears.

Reviewed by Steve

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