Next book

EMMA’S WAR

AN AID WORKER, A WARLORD, ISLAM, OIL, AND SLAVES--A TRUE STORY OF LOVE AND DEATH IN THE SUDAN

Solid background, cinematic descriptions, and the author’s own intimate knowledge of the Sudan and the international aid...

Compelling portrait of an independent-minded British aid worker who married a Sudanese warlord.

Atlanta-based journalist Scroggins, who has reported from the Sudan, uses the story of Emma McCune, a young woman with fashion-model looks who found something in African culture missing from her own life, as a through-line to follow the neglected history of Africa in the 1980s and ’90s, ravaged by famine and genocidal tribal warfare. Daughter of a colonial tea plantation executive who killed himself after repatriation from India to England, McCune became involved with African student political groups as a college student in the UK in the mid-1980s. Once in the Sudan, she proved a diligent and charismatic figure, eschewing white privileges, behaving at times more Sudanese than Western, and developing an almost cult-like following, particularly among women and children. McCune became even more of a curiosity when she married the leader of an armed Sudanese faction, Riek Machar. This marriage alienated some of her former colleagues, and much of the organizational support she had relied on diminished when she appeared to be assuming some of her husband’s political views. Bouts with malaria and dysentery took their toll on her health, and she came to desperately lack funds, but she remained capable, according to one friend, of looking smashing in a cocktail dress while dining out with other whites in Nairobi (although someone else inevitably had to pay her bill). By the time of her 1993 death in a Nairobi traffic accident at age 29, she was pregnant, optimistic, and pressing ahead with new plans to assist Sudanese women. Her story had by then attracted the interest of several reporters and film documentarians, who found her singularly intriguing, but also a tad bizarre.

Solid background, cinematic descriptions, and the author’s own intimate knowledge of the Sudan and the international aid community in Africa, enhance this profile of a woman who gave herself fully to her ideals, and to her fate.

Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2002

ISBN: 0-375-40397-3

Page Count: 400

Publisher: Pantheon

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2002

Next book

NIGHT

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. 

The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the sphere of suffering shared, and in this case extended to the death march itself, there is no spiritual or emotional legacy here to offset any reader reluctance.

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

Awards & Accolades

Likes

  • Readers Vote
  • 62


Our Verdict

  • Our Verdict
  • GET IT


Google Rating

  • google rating
  • google rating
  • google rating
  • google rating
  • google rating

  • Kirkus Reviews'
    Best Books Of 2016


  • New York Times Bestseller


  • Pulitzer Prize Finalist

Next book

WHEN BREATH BECOMES AIR

A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...

Awards & Accolades

Likes

  • Readers Vote
  • 62


Our Verdict

  • Our Verdict
  • GET IT


Google Rating

  • google rating
  • google rating
  • google rating
  • google rating
  • google rating

  • Kirkus Reviews'
    Best Books Of 2016


  • New York Times Bestseller


  • Pulitzer Prize Finalist

A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.

Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”

A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.

Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016

ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6

Page Count: 248

Publisher: Random House

Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015

Close Quickview