This book represents the beginning—or a necessary reset—of an essential dialogue.
A “lost boy” of Sudan and a California housewife forge a bond in this compelling dual memoir.
Deng and Bernstein (co-authors: They Poured Fire on Us from the Sky: The Story of Three Lost Boys from Sudan, 2005) met in San Diego just a few weeks before 9/11, brought together by the International Rescue Committee. They each experienced a process of acclimatization: Deng wrestled with what it meant to live in America, while Bernstein struggled with assumptions of her own. The book is written as a back-and-forth text, interspersing chapters in both voices to create a sense of conversation. It’s an effective strategy that helps readers understand on a visceral level the gap between these two very different sensibilities and the accommodations required on every side. Bernstein, for her part, can be funny; early in the book, she describes a humorous scene in which her son, Cliff, introduced Deng and two fellow refugees to the soda machine at a fast food restaurant. It’s a small moment, but it highlights a major issue: the difficulty of adapting, or moving, between two vastly different worlds. For Deng and his fellow refugees, America was the land of opportunity. “The poorest man in America is like the richest in Africa,” he was told. Beset by parasites, trying to adjust to working in a supermarket, he was confounded at nearly every turn. For Bernstein, the challenges were different: to see and interact with Deng, on his own terms. “They needed an advocate,” she writes. “A huge learning curve lay ahead for all of us.” The narrative traces the arc of that collective shift. Although it occasionally gets bogged down in the detritus of daily life, it is an important reminder of all we share as human beings. “Being a refugee,” Deng writes, “can feel like an invasion of another nation’s economy, resources, culture and space….I understand those feelings because as a refugee I am a person whose own way of life was violated in my native land.”
This book represents the beginning—or a necessary reset—of an essential dialogue.Pub Date: Nov. 6, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-982546-22-9
Page Count: 424
Publisher: Blackstone
Review Posted Online: Sept. 2, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
SEEN & HEARD
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