Skip to main content
By

Zeitoun by Dave Eggers
Click here to check availability in AFPLS

Dave Eggers, author of What is the What, A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, and You Shall Know Our Velocity, writes another wonderful work of human drama. In Zeitoun, presented in the context of a family biography, Syrian-born Abdulrahman Zeitoun chooses to remain in New Orleans during Katrina to watch over the family property while his wife and children flee the storm. In the quiet desolation after the hurricane he paddles around the flooded streets in a canoe, helping out those in need, feeding abandoned dogs, and contemplating the future of the ravaged city. In an unexpected turn of events he is picked up by law enforcement, ostensibly for looting, and is thrown into a makeshift Gitmo-like chain link prison behind the Amtrak station before being transferred (without being allowed a phone call or a hearing, or even having his rights read to him) to a maximum security prison outside of Baton Rouge. Time passes before his family learns of his fate, and his situation is seemingly made more complicated due to the fact that he is an Arab in a post-9/11 world. A fascinating story about a man wanting to do right, but caught up in the confusion and government ineptitude that enveloped New Orleans in the days and weeks after Hurricane Katrina. ©Ken Vesey

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Here we are / Graham Swift

By
This short novel offers a nostalgic look at England in the 1940s and 1950s. Evie, having just lost her husband after a long marriage, looks back at the fateful summer when they met up at the pleasure palace at the end of the Brighton pier. Evie was meant to marry someone else, Ronnie Doane, aka “The Great Pablo,” a magician whose talents really pull in the crowds in the days before television kept people in their front rooms (and to whom she serves as the feather-plumed magician’s assistant). The novel tells of Ronnie’s back story as a London child war evacuee, whose second family in Oxford is so nurturing and loving that he is conflicted about going back to his real home when the war is over. But Evie marries Jack instead and is ghosted (quite literally) by Ronnie even in her final years of life. A wonderful story about people and relationships.
Post a Comment
Read more
By
Addie Pray / Joe David Brown (more recently published as Paper Moon ) Click here to check for availability at AFPLS This 1971 novel was the inspiration for the Peter Bogdanovich movie Paper Moon . Eleven-year-old Addie and her maybe-father “Long Boy” Moses Pray crisscross the Deep South “ramifying” (scamming) people during the Great Depression. Addie’s street smarts and perceived girlish innocence, along with Long Boy’s cleverness and shrewd business acumen build their operation until they are dealing in millions. The movie remained pretty true to the first half of the book (though it moved the location from Alabama to Kansas), but the adventures continue far beyond where the movie left off. The decades haven’t dimmed the magic of this rollicking adventure, either in the film or the book. ©Ken Vesey, 17 June 2010
2 comments
Read more

The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie / Alan Bradley

By
Pippi Longstocking meets Miss Marple in the character of precocious 11-year-old Flavia de Luce, the youngest of three daughters in a once well-to-do family in early 1950s rural England. This first mystery in an intended series finds Flavia beating the local police inspector at his own game in solving the mystery surrounding the murder of an old school mate of her father's in their back garden (in the cucumber patch no less). Clues include a bird indigenous to Norway, a rare stamp, and a bit of flaky pie crust. This nostalgic and innocent whodunnit will have you at the edge of your seat by its suspenseful climax. I can see BBC/PBS picking up on the popularity of this charming mystery. The second in the series has already been published and the third is soon to follow. And by the way, here's a great library quote from Flavia on page 50: "... it occurred to me that Heaven must be a place where the library is open twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. No
1 comment
Read more