Eggers Dave. Zeitoun

Zeitoun is a nonfiction book written by Dave Eggers and published by McSweeney's in 2009. It tells the story of Abdulrahman Zeitoun, the Syrian-American owner of a painting and contracting company in New Orleans who chose to ride out Hurricane Katrina in his Uptown home. After the storm he traveled the flooded city in a secondhand canoe rescuing neighbors, caring for abandoned pets and distributing fresh water. Soon after the storm, Zeitoun was arrested without reason or explanation at one of his rental houses by a mixed group of National Guardsmen and local police. He was not immediately charged with a crime but was imprisoned for 23 days without having stood trial. During that time he was accused of terrorist activity presumably because of his ethnicity, was treated inhumanely, and was refused medical attention and the use of a phone to alert his family. His wife and daughters, staying with friends far away from the city, only knew that he had seemingly disappeared from the face of the earth.