Zeitoun is the tale of Abdulrahman Zeitoun. Upstanding citizen of New Orleans and successful businessman. When hurricane Katrina hit the city Zeitoun sent his family to safety and decided to stay back to protect his home and help people out using his little canoe. A week or so later, he disappears. 
 I cant say anymore without giving away the punchline. But the book is a true story. It exposes the utter mess that was the post-Kantrina response of the US government and also talks about the prejudices and lawlessness that the system shows when confronted with that nameless enemy called 'terrorism'. 
 Eggers writes a suspenseful tale. The Zeitouns are from Syria and we are taken there for colorful glimpses of life in a small island in the Mediterranean off the Syrian coast. 
 Gives a really good perspective on the US government and society works. Or worked at least. The immediate post-Katrina setting is compared by the story's characters to a 'third world' country but im like hay man i live in a third world country and most of the time we have it better than whats going on there. As a matter of fact, things got very ugly down there after the hurricane and Eggers exposes all of this and shows exactly how much of a clusterboink the much praised US system really became in the aftermath of the hurricane. It also exposes many intrinsic weaknesses in a system that tends treat people less like humans and more like bits of paper to be shoved around, hidden and filed away in cluttered bureaucratic desktops. 
 At the end of it you can really only wonder what happened to all the other Zeitouns over there who never got books written about their experiences.