Oh Dave. Your fiction befuddles me but your non-fiction talks straight to my heart. After sharing the plight of Sudanese Lost Boy Valentino Achak Deng in his earlier work What is the What, this time around its Abdulrahman Zeitoun’s turn. A Syrian Muslim who lives in New Orleans with his American-born Muslim wife Kathy and their kids, he gets caught up in the storm of disorganization and government fallibility in the aftermath of 2005’s Hurricane Katrina.
I’m not going to give too much away, but even writing about it now makes my blood boil at the complete ineptitude and cowboy ways of the Bush administration. More about guns and force than compassion and common sense, they made a complete cock-up of the humanitarian effort so sorely needed after the natural disaster and through the plight of this one man, shows how afraid, paranoid and stupid the whole country’s law enforcement and government agencies had become in the wake of September 11.
Read this and weep.
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Done. I'm all over this.
ReplyDeleteI forgot to mention that it's practically the American version of The Tall Man....remember how angry that book made both of us??
ReplyDeleteOh God. I'm borrowing a copy of this from a work mate this week. Stay tuned!
ReplyDeleteWow. What an amazing family. It's heart breaking to hear their experience of getting completely fucked on by their own government and know that it's only 1 of many.
ReplyDeleteThe contrast between what was possibly (Camp Greyhound) and what happened (the Superdome), and the difference in the approaches of a lone man in a canoe and an over-resourced, ineffective bunch of punks in a fan boat.
Yeesh.
I agree - I have a book of his short stories that I can't read, but I loved A Heartbreaking work and What is the What, and this was incredible. Thanks Dave. Keep it up.