Details
Synopsis
Tracy Kidder (MOUNTAINS BEYOND MOUNTAINS) has a gift for crafting exhilarating narrative nonfiction, and he has found perhaps his most inspirational subject in Burundian refugee Deogratias, who barely escaped Africa with his life, but eventually returned there to build a hospital after a remarkable rise from poverty and homelessness in the United States. When the Rwandan genocide of the mid-1990s spilled across the border into Burundi, Deo and other Tutsis were suddenly being hunted by murderous Hutus, causing him to flee back into Rwanda. As Deo reveals to Kidder, he was faced with almost certain death on numerous occasions, but was miraculously able to escape the slaughter and fly to New York, though he did not speak English and did not know a single soul who could help get him started. He found some semblance of refuge with a homeless community in Central Park, and began delivering groceries and doing other odd jobs, while spending his free time at the library reading dictionaries to learn the language. A few fateful connections led him to Columbia University, where he was able to complete his medical degree. By the time Deo and Kidder return to Burundi in 2006 to see the medical clinic he built in a remote village, any reader with half a heart should be reaching for the box of tissues as a result of this truly superlative true story. Selected by Publishers Weekly as one of the 100 Best Books of 2009.
| Size | | Length: | 277 pages | | Height: | 9.5 in | | Width: | 6.5 in | | Thickness: | 1.0 in | | Weight: | 20.2 oz |
Publisher's Notes
First Line: "As we drove through southwestern Burundi, I felt as if we were being followed by the mountain called Ganza, the way a child feels followed by the moon. The road climbed through deeply folded countryside. We would round a corner, and another broad face of Ganza would appear."
Industry Reviews
"This profoundly gripping, hopeful and crucial testament is a work of the utmost skill, sympathy and moral clarity." (starred review)
(05/11/2009)
"Deo's hopeful story may be intended as some kind of uplifting continental metaphor, but it's inevitably something else as well: a depressing tale of Africa's chaotic destitution, which grinds on despite heroes and even saints. But despair is far from the point here. Kidder's abiding preoccupation is the everyday heroism of ordinary people, and his latest is rife with such unsung heroes....The decency of some in the face of others' almost unimaginable cruelty adds richness and wonder to what otherwise might have been the amply remarkable story of one person's miraculous survival."
(08/23/2009)
"Kidder picks up the trail of the old New Journalists, like Tom Wolfe, who pioneered in using the techniques of novelists to tell nonfiction stories....[He] doesn't kid us about the problems this presents: How do you know this is really what happened? How can you check and verify? But what you lose in watertight accuracy, you gain in immediacy and emotional truth. This is a genocide seen from the inside. This is how it feels to be nearly hunted to death because of a 'racial' difference that seems meaningless to you."
(08/24/2009)
"Tracy Kidder may have just written his finest work....The story seems to tell itself, but that's never the way it really happens. Strategic decisions have to be made, and Kidder seems to make all the right ones....[His] approach is a reminder of what can make American nonfiction so exceptional....It's that bottom-up quality that defies big-budget marketing and calculation....In this connected age, disruptive change--and transforming insights--bubble up furiously from the least likely places. Kidder saw that bottom-up flash of energy in the smile of a peripheral man. And we are lucky he did."
(08/30/2009)
"[E]xtraordinarily stirring....The story of Deogratias...is as harrowing an account of human suffering as you will ever read. But it is also a miracle of human courage. In it, a man rises against all odds to achieve his highest aspirations and help countless others along the way....We cannot help but be in awe of this gentle cicerone who survives war's ghastly labyrinth to emerge a better man."
(08/30/2009)
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