Book in Common

2011-2012

Zeitoun, by Dave Eggers

The 2011-2012 Book in Common is a deeply felt and moving book that  comes out of New Orleans and the aftermath of Katrina in 2005. It tells the story of Abdulrahman Zeitoun, a Syrian-American and father of four, who chose to stay through the storm to protect his house and contracting business. In the days after the storm, he floated through the flood in a canoe, passing on supplies and helping those he could. A week later he disappeared. Eggers’s riveting nonfiction book, three years in the making, explores Zeitoun’s Syrian heritage, his marriage to Kathy, an American convert to Islam, and their children, and the surreal atmosphere (in New Orleans and the United States generally) in which what happened to Abdulrahman Zeitoun was possible.

Author Dave Eggers has written several other books, including What Is the What, a finalist for the 2006 National Book Critics Circle Award. That book, about Valentino Achak Deng, a survivor of the civil war in southern Sudan, gave birth to the Valentino Achak Deng Foundation, run by Mr. Deng and dedicated to building secondary schools in southern Sudan.

Eggers is the founder and editor of McSweeney’s, an independent publishing house based in San Francisco. In 2002, with Nínive Calegari he co-founded 826 Valencia, a nonprofit writing and tutoring center for youth in the Mission District of San Francisco. Local communities have since opened sister 826 centers in Chicago, Los Angeles, Brooklyn, Ann Arbor, Seattle, and Boston.

If you would like more information about this book or would like to help with discussions or programming, please contact Brooks Thorlaksson at BThorlaksson@csuchico.edu.