(Random House, 277 pages, $26)
The hospital was unusually quiet on the day the killings began. Deo, a 22-year-old intern, was making his morning rounds in the rural Burundi facility when he learned that the country’s president, a Hutu, had been assassinated, and that his kinsmen were now taking their revenge. Minutes later, there was shattering glass and gunshots, followed by the smell of burning flesh. Deo cowered under a bed as the assailants murdered every Tutsi they could find. Luckily spared, he fled on a nightmarish six-month journey. A classmate’s father put him on a plane for New York, where he slept his first night in a squalid room reeking of sewage. It would be months before he realized that he invariably mispronounced the valuable word “hi” as “hee.”
Tracy Kidder “may have just written his finest work,” said Ron Suskind in The New York Times. The Pulitzer Prize–winning author of 1981’s The Soul of a New Machine has allowed Deo to be a fully human protagonist instead of a saint, so it’s all the more powerful to see both the atrocities of Burundi’s civil war and the realities of modern America through his eyes. “Kidder’s rendering of what Deo endured just before he boarded that plane for New York is one of the most powerful passages of modern nonfiction.” If anything, Kidder is “too fine a writer,” said Dwight Garner, also in the Times. He mentions dogs carrying human heads in their mouths, but never dwells long on such horrors. Given the material he’s working with, his “clear, perfectly buffed, shyly self-satisfied sentences can be curiously distancing.”
Subscribe to The Week
Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.
Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters
From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.
From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.
For all Kidder’s skill, he also occasionally makes Deo seem less an individual than a symbol, said William Easterly in The Wall Street Journal. Africa isn’t as violent and destitute as Deo’s experiences would suggest. So his harrowing story, though ultimately uplifting, ends up affirming rather than challenging the reader’s worldview. Deo, against all odds, eventually returns to his native Burundi village to launch a free medical clinic, said Johann Hari in Slate.com. But it’s not clear that readers are expected to see this moment as purely redemptive. Admirable as his choice is, Kidder subtly hints that Deo has deceived himself into believing that his genocidal countrymen are worthy of forgiveness.
-
Who owns Gaza? Israel's occupation plansThe Explainer Egypt, Israel and Britain have ruled the beleaguered territory
-
Savages: a tragi-comedy set in a 'quirky handcrafted world'The Week Recommends This new animated film by Oscar-nominated filmmaker Claude Barras is undeniably political, but it has a hopeful message
-
Why 'faceless bots' are interviewing job huntersIn The Spotlight Artificial intelligence is taking over a crucial part of recruitment
-
Also of interest...in picture books for grown-upsfeature How About Never—Is Never Good for You?; The Undertaking of Lily Chen; Meanwhile, in San Francisco; The Portlandia Activity Book
-
Author of the week: Karen Russell
feature Karen Russell could use a rest.
-
The Double Life of Paul de Man by Evelyn Barish
feature Evelyn Barish “has an amazing tale to tell” about the Belgian-born intellectual who enthralled a generation of students and academic colleagues.
-
Book of the week: Flash Boys: A Wall Street Revolt by Michael Lewis
feature Michael Lewis's description of how high-frequency traders use lightning-fast computers to their advantage is “guaranteed to make blood boil.”
-
Also of interest...in creative rebellion
feature A Man Called Destruction; Rebel Music; American Fun; The Scarlet Sisters
-
Author of the week: Susanna Kaysen
feature For a famous memoirist, Susanna Kaysen is highly ambivalent about sharing details about her life.
-
You Must Remember This: Life and Style in Hollywood’s Golden Age by Robert Wagner
feature Robert Wagner “seems to have known anybody who was anybody in Hollywood.”
-
Book of the week: Astoria: John Jacob Astor and Thomas Jefferson’s Lost Pacific Empire by Peter Stark
feature The tale of Astoria’s rise and fall turns out to be “as exciting as anything in American history.”