My husband and I listened to the audio book form of this gripping, true story on a trip to Virginia. Listening to it made the time fly. The treatment of Zeitoun and his family during the terrible Hurricane Katrina aftermath was outrageous! Most of the inept responses to this tragic storm were made by FEMA. What they did to this poor man was absolutely unbelievable! A gripping account.

Much has been said in other reviews about the plot, so I won't go there. This book gripped me in its pages, and occasionally I would be so caught up in the characters' lives that I'd have to put the book down for awhile and think about something else. It was a close look into the lives of the German citizens, who had to cope with a war that they never wanted. At one point in the story German mother, Mutti Emmerich, said, "We have no one to blame but ourselves for the situation we are in." That is small consolation when you are slogging through the freezing countryside for weeks, trying to escape the Soviets. The whole book was just a close look into a time and place in history that I knew very little about.