What separates Kidder from the nonfiction pack is the compassion and deep humanism that shine through his prose. In the end, Deo returns to Burundi to open a medical clinic. They take him into their lives and into their flat, and help him make the connections that get him into Columbia University and then into medical school at Dartmouth. Deo has the good fortune to meet a former nun on one of his grocery deliveries, an inner-city saint who - along with a couple she knows - practice the sacred act of hospitality. When that doesn't work out, Deo starts sleeping in Central Park. Meanwhile, he tries sharing a Harlem squat with a dysfunctional family of junkies, crack addicts and hookers.
He makes a few dollars an hour delivering groceries to some of the finest penthouses in Manhattan. Deo survives his African nightmare only to go on to be abused and exploited American style. We follow his escape to the streets of New York City, where one of Africa's brightest prospects goes through another kind of nightmare - the struggle to survive in an American city when you have no money, don't know a soul and speak no English. The book follows Deo, as he is called, through the genocidal horror that terrorized Rwanda and the lesser-known nation of Burundi in the early 1990s. "Strength in What Remains" is the story of a young African medical student named Deogratias. I do have a few suggestions, but let's start with the good news. This New England author is one of the masters of the art, a winner of the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize. Part 2 is solid piece of journalistic memoir about the way Kidder went about getting the story.Īs someone who has spent the past few years trying to turn his journalism into narrative nonfiction, I tremble at the idea of telling Tracy Kidder how to write a book. It comes as no surprise to fans of Tracy Kidder that the man does it all in his new book, "Strength in What Remains: A Journey of Remembrance and Forgiveness." Part 1 of this work is a 145-page masterpiece. Their job is to inform, entertain and enlighten. The best ones are great reporters and fine writers. Their importance in the scheme of things is to let us know what's really going on in the world. Journalists and writers of narrative nonfiction have more or less the same job. By Tracy Kidder ( Random House 277 pages $26)
0 kommentar(er)
