Introduction In 2005 Hurricane Katrina completely changed the lives of the many affected New Orleans citizens. It had a death toll of 1,833 and its overall destruction path caused the demolition of more than 800,000 buildings. The media coverage for the hurricane was very suspicious and made the situation seem worse. This led to many false beliefs about what had happened during this tragic event. Dave Eggers an acclaimed author took the lack of knowledge about the hurricane as a chance to write a book to educate people. He ended up writing the book “Zeitoun” which was a powerful narrative nonfiction account about the Zeitoun family. The Zeitoun’s were a lovable family and the book makes readers develop a special connection to the family. …show more content…
Throughout the book there are many parts where the family seems happy together, creating a powerful pathos. Readers experience a loss of connection after reports from various sources including The New York Times wrote, “Last month, Mr. Zeitoun was jailed on charges that he attacked Ms. Zeitoun with a tire iron, punching and choking her in public until a witness stopped them” (Brown). The book makes it clear that Zeitoun and Kathy really loved each other. Readers are given 40 pages of dialogues from Kathy during a period of time where she could not contact him. Eggers does a good job helping readers understand how she felt with examples such as, “Kathy woke up tense. She fed the kids, trying not to think about the fact that her husband hadn’t called the afternoon before” (Eggers, 173). The aftermath leaves readers wondering why Kathy would ever be worried for a man that would later abuse …show more content…
The book gives readers a sense of hope for the family. In certain instances it seems like their lives are going to improve in examples such as, “In the morning he awakens to the sounds of his children-four young ones in the house now, so many voices in this now-bigger house, the smell of fresh paint filling the home with possibility” (Eggers, 322) . The book also leaves no indication on what went wrong. Many people look to reports from Kathy such as her testimony to NOLA Crime where she said,“the abuse had started long before Katrina. Her husband used to hit her, slap her or punch her every now and then, she said, but he didn't beat her.” (Emily, 2016) .Readers use this testimony to claim that Eggers created a false connection, although he denies ever knowing about these claims. Kathy has also given many different statements about when the abuse started, but one thing that is consistent is that it became worse after Katrina. Many readers also claim that the instances in camp greyhound may have caused him to become more aggressive, but with various claims from Kathy and the general lack of public knowledge about the situation, the readers are left with no real
The job of a child welfare worker appears to be a demanding profession that promotes the child’s safety, but also strengthens the family organization around them in order to successfully raise the children. This child welfare workers work in the system known as the Child Protective Services whose initiative is to protect the overall welfare of the child. The short novel From the Eye of the Storm: the Experiences of a Child Welfare Worker by Cynthia Crosson-Tower demonstrates the skills necessary to deal with the practice of social work along with both its challenges and its happy moments. The novel consists of some of the cases involving Tower’s actual career in social work. In reading the book, I was able to experience some of the actual cases in which children dealt with physical and mental abuse from their families that caused them to end up within the system. Also, some of these children had issues in adapting to foster and adoptive families based on the issues they faced earlier in life. As we have learned earlier in the course, the violence that a child experiences early in life has an overall affect on the person they become as they grow into adulthood. When children deal with adverse childhood experiences, they are at a higher risk for abusing drugs and/or alcohol, increased likelihood of abusing their own child or spouse, higher rates of violent and nonviolent criminal behavior, along with several other issues throughout their lifespan.
Dave Eggers’ novel Zeitoun is labeled as a work of non-fiction. It tells the story of a Syrian-American man named Abdulrahman Zeitoun, also known as Zeitoun, who chose to stay in New Orleans to ride out one of the worst natural disasters in American history, Hurricane Katrina. Zeitoun, a family man and devoted to his business, stayed in the city as the hurricane approached to protect not only his home and business, but also his neighbors’ and friends’ properties. 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 and three others were arrested without reason or explanation at one of his rental houses by a mixed group of U.S. Army National Guard soldiers and local police officers.
A storm such as Katrina undoubtedly ruined homes and lives with its destructive path. Chris Rose touches upon these instances of brokenness to elicit sympathy from his audience. Throughout the novel, mental illness rears its ugly head. Tales such as “Despair” reveal heart-wrenching stories emerging from a cycle of loss. This particular article is concerned with the pull of New Orleans, its whisper in your ear when you’ve departed that drags you home. Not home as a house, because everything physical associated with home has been swept away by the storm and is now gone. Rather, it is concerned with home as a feeling, that concept that there is none other than New Orleans. Even when there is nothing reminiscent of what you once knew, a true New Orleanian will seek a fresh start atop the foundation of rubbish. This is a foreign concept for those not native to New Orleans, and a New Orleanian girl married to a man from Atlanta found her relationship split as a result of flooding waters. She was adamant about staying, and he returned to where he was from. When he came back to New Orleans for her to try and make it work, they shared grim feelings and alcohol, the result of which was the emergence of a pact reminiscent of Romeo and Juliet. This couple decided they would kill themselves because they could see no light amongst the garbage and rot, and failure was draining them of any sense of optimism. She realized the fault in this agreement,
to Paycheck is the documentation of a slice of Katrina’s life, raising awareness of the struggles
In the late summer of 2005, a terrible tragedy occurred that changed the lives of many in the south-east region of the United States. A Category 3, named storm, named Hurricane Katrina, hit the Gulf Coast on the 29th of August and led to the death of 1,836 and millions of dollars’ worth of damage (Waple 2005). The majority of the damage occurred in New Orleans, Louisiana. Waple writes in her article that winds “gusted over 100 mph in New Orleans, just west of the eye” (Waple 2005). Not only was the majority of the damage due to the direct catastrophes of the storm but also city’s levees could no longer hold thus breaking and releasing great masses of water. Approximately, 80% of the city was submerged at sea level. Despite the vast amount of damage and danger all throughout the city, officials claimed that there was work being done to restore the city of New Orleans as a whole but many parts, and even the people, of the city were overlooked while areas of the city with higher economic value, and more tourist traffic, were prioritized along with those individuals.
On August 29th, 2005, Hurricane Katrina, the most expensive hurricane in American history, made landfall in Louisiana with winds of one hundred and twenty-seven miles per hour (“Hurricane Katrina Statistics Fast Facts”). The sheer magnitude of the amount of lives and property lost was enormous, and it was triggered simply by warm ocean waters near the Bahamas ("How Hurricane Katrina Formed"). Nature was indifferent to whether the raging winds and rain would die off in the ocean or wipe out cities; it only follows the rules of physics. A multitude of American authors has attempted to give accounts and interpretations of their encounters with the disinterested machine that is nature. Two authors, Stephen Crane and Henry David Thoreau, had rather contrasting and conflicting interpretations of their own interactions with nature. Crane’s work, “The Open Boat,” is story based on his experience as a survivor
Zeitoun is very close with his family and he takes his family like nobody else. When Hurricane Katrina landed in 2005, an endless number of people were affected. Mayor Nagin ordered a first-ever mandatory evacuation. Kathy moved with the children to her sister’s house in Baton Rouge. Zeitoun refused to leave with his family because he didn’t want to lose his property, but at the same time, his customers trusted him and gave him their house keys to check on their houses, which caused his separation from his family.
From a very young age, Bone was sexually abused by her step-father, Glen Waddell. Like Bone, Dorothy Allison also suffered abuse from her step-father, starting at the young age of five years-old. During the time of the novel, and until recent years, it was unthinkable to speak of any sort of abuse outside the household. Throughout history, children have been victims of abuse by their parents or other adults, and fo...
According to Hurricane Katrina At Issue Disasters, economic damages from Hurricane Katrina have been estimated at more than $200 billion… More than a million people were displaced by the storm… An estimated 120,000 homes were abandoned and will probably be destroyed in Louisiana alone (At * Issue). For this perspective, “Hurricane Katrina change the Gulf Coast landscape and face of its culture when it hit in 2005” (Rushton). A disaster like Katrina is something the victims are always going to remember, for the ones the lost everything including their love ones. Katrina became a nightmare for all the people that were surround in the contaminated waters in the city of New Orleans. People were waiting to be rescue for days,
Media Coverage on Hurricane Katrina News of the devastating hurricane Katrina and its economic, political, social, and humanitarian consequences dominated global headlines in an unprecedented manner when this natural catastrophe struck the region of New Orleans in mid August 2005 (Katrinacoverage.com). As a tradition, large-scale disasters like Katrina, inevitably, bring out a combination of the best and the worst news media instincts. As such, during the height of Hurricane Katrina’s rage, many journalists for once seized their gag reflex and refused to swallow shallow and misleading excuses and explanations from public officials. Nevertheless, the media’s eagerness to report thinly substantiated rumors may have played a key role in bringing about cultural wreckage that may take the American society years to clean up. To begin with, anybody privy to the events in New Orleans that ensued after Hurricane Katrina struck knows that horrible things that had nothing to do with natural causes happened: there were murders, gunfire directed at a rescue helicopter, assaults and, courtesy of New Orleans’ city police department, a myriad other crimes that most probably went unreported (Katrinacoverage.com).
Hurricane Katrina was one of the most devastating natural disasters to happen in the United States. The storm resulted in more then US$100 billion in damage when the cities flood protection broke and 80% of the city was flooded (1). The protection failure was not the only cause for the massive flooding, the hurricanes clockwise rotation pulled water from north of New Orleans into the city. 330,000 homes were destroyed and 400,000 people from New Orleans were displaced, along with 13,00 killed (1). Although the population quickly recovered, the rate of recovery slowed down as the years went on leading us to believe not everyone
Shah, Anup (2005, November 13). Hurricane Katrina. Global Issues. Retrieved from mhtml:file://F:Hurricane Katrina—Global Issues. mht
...e governments discriminated against poor African Americans residents, but it is only natural that after receiving little aid and having no place to go, those citizens would not return to the Crescent City. The immense displacement caused by the most expensive natural disaster in United States history proved that the City of New Orleans, and the United States as a whole, was not prepared for a natural disaster of that magnitude. It also showed the challenges urban planners face in times of crisis and the weaknesses they need to overcome in order to avoid another decade of reconstruction efforts after tragedy strikes. Despite the fact that nine years post-Katrina many people have still not returned to the city, New Orleans, with every flaw it has, is still an encouraging example proving that with enough effort, battered places can rebuild and begin to prosper again.
When Deborah was only sixteen she became pregnant with her first child by Cheetah and boy she liked when she was younger. Cheetah and Deborah got married and then had their second child. Deborah became very unhappy in the marriage because Cheetah started drinking and doing drugs. He started abusing Deborah. Cheetah pushed Deborah so much she almost killed him if it wasn’t for Bobbette. Deborah’s brothers Sonny and Lawrence were doing well except for Joe. Joe was another case. Joe went to the military, and the family was hoping that would do him good; but he came out worse than when he went in. Joe was threatened and beaten up by a boy named Ivy. Joe was in so much rage he went and stabbed him and killed him. Joe eventually turned himself in to the law, was convicted of second degree murder and sentenced fifteen years in prison.
Fink, Sheri. "Hurricane Katrina: after the flood." The Gaurdian. N.p., 7 Feb. 2014. Web. 17 Apr. 2014.