Reviews
A review of the book in The New York Times.
An article in the Wall Street Journal.
An interview with Salon.com.
An article and interview in the New Orleans Times-Picayune.
A review in the New Orleans Times-Picayune.
A review in the San Francisco Chronicle.
A review in Entertainment Weekly.
A review in the Miami Herald.
The Chicago Sun-Times says: “Zeitoun offers a transformative experience to anyone open to it. Eggers’ writing is pitch perfect.” Click here to read the whole review.
Creative Loafing says Zeitoun is “the best book this reviewer has read so far this year.” Click here to read the full review.
In a five-star review of Zeitoun, The Dutch newspaper, De Volkskrant calls Zeitoun:
“A devastatingly beautiful book. The details the author has dug up make this book a masterpiece. Dave Eggers is not only a post-modern romancier but deep inside he is also a true journalist, an observer with a golden pen.”
“Imagine Charles Dickens, his sentimentality in check but his journalistic eyes wide open, roaming New Orleans after it was buried by Hurricane Katrina…. Eggers’s tone is pitch-perfect — suspense blended with just enough information to stoke reader outrage and what is likely to be a typical response: How could this happen in America?…. It’s the stuff of great narrative nonfiction…. Fifty years from now, when people want to know what happened to this once-great city during a shameful episode of our history, they will still be talking about a family named Zeitoun.” 
- Timothy Egan, The New York Times
“This is a beautiful book. Zeitoun is a poignant, haunting, ethereal story about New Orleans in peril. Eggers has bottled up the feeling of post-Katrina despair better than anyone else. This is a simple story with a lingering radiance.”
- Douglas Brinkley, author of The Great Deluge: Hurricane Katrina, New Orleans, and the Mississippi Gulf Coast
“Zeitoun is an American epic. The post-Katrina trials of Abdulrahman Zeitoun would have baffled even Kafka’s Joseph K. Though Zeitoun’s story could have been a source of cynicism or despair, Dave Eggers’s clear and elegant prose manages to deftly capture many of the signature shortcomings of American life while holding onto the innate optimism and endless drive to more closely match our ideals that Zeitoun and his adopted land share. Juggling these contradictions, Eggers captures the puzzle of America.”- Billy Sothern, author of Down in New Orleans
“Zeitoun is a gripping and amazing story that highlights so much about the tragedy of Katrina, post-9/11 life for Arabs and Muslims, and the beautiful nature of American multi-cultural society.”- Yousef Munayyer, policy analyst, American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee
“Zeitoun is an instant American classic carved from fierce eloquence and a haunting moral sensibility. By wrestling with the demons of xenophobia and racial profiling that converged in the swirling vortex of Hurricane Katrina and post-9/11 America, Eggers lets loose the angels of wisdom and courage that hover over the lives of the beleaguered, but miraculously unbroken, Abdulrahman and Kathy Zeitoun. This is a major work full of fire and wit by one of our most important writers.”- Michael Eric Dyson, author of Come Hell or High Water
“Through the experience of one man and his brave wife, this book allows you to experience the natural and man-made devastation wrought by Hurricane Katrina with entirely new eyes. What Abdulrahman Zeitoun (and others like him) endured in the aftermath of that storm should never be forgotten. This book goes a long way toward ensuring that we never will.” - Peter Orner, author of The Second Coming of Mavala Shikongo
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