About
Dave Eggers grew up near Chicago, attended the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign, and is the author of five books. His first, A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, a memoir, was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. It was followed by You Shall Know Our Velocity!, a novel, and by How We Are Hungry, a collection of short stories. His latest book, What Is the What, was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. In 1998, Eggers founded McSweeney's, an independent publishing house now located in San Francisco. It publishes books, a quarterly literary journal, The Believer (a monthly magazine of essays and interviews), Wholphin (a short-film DVD quarterly), and a daily humor website. In 2002, Eggers opened 826 Valencia, a writing and tutoring lab for young people in San Francisco's Mission District. There, he continues to teach writing to high-school students, and runs a summer publishing camp. 826 Valencia now has satellite chapters in Brooklyn, Ann Arbor, Los Angeles, Seattle, Boston, and Chicago. A staunch advocate of teachers, Eggers instituted a monthly grant for exceptional Bay Area teachers, and in 2005 he co-wrote Teachers Have It Easy: The Big Sacrifices and Small Salaries of America's Teachers. His interest in oral history led to his 2004 co-founding of Voice of Witness, a nonprofit series of books that use oral history to illuminate human-rights crises around the world. He recently co-wrote, with Spike Jonze, the film adaptation of Maurice Sendak's Where the Wild Things Are, and with his wife, the novelist Vendela Vida, wrote a screenplay currently being directed by Sam Mendes and starring Brown graduate John Krasinski. With Valentino Deng, Eggers is the co-founder of the Valentino Achak Deng Foundation, which is improving educational opportunities for Sudanese children in Sudan and the United States.
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I’m in the middle of Tamim Ansary’s Destiny Disrupted: A History of the World through Islamic Eyes, and it’s incredibly illuminating. Ansary pretty much covers the entire history of Islam in an incredibly readable and lucid way. I’ve been recommending this book to everyone I know. Especially when people are looking for a comprehensive-but-approachable way to look at world history through the lens of Islam, there’s no better book.
When Hurricane Katrina struck New Orleans, Abdulrahman Zeitoun, a prosperous Syrian-American and father of four, chose to stay through the storm to protect his house and contracting business. 
