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WHAT THEY MEANT FOR EVIL

Name: WHAT THEY MEANT FOR EVIL
Author: Rebecca Deng
ISBN: 978-1-5460-1722-6

HOW A LOST GIRL OF SUDAN FOUND HEALING, PEACE, AND PURPOSE IN THE MIDST OF SUFFERING

by Rebecca Deng with Ginger Kolbaba ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 10, 2019

A powerful story of determination and strong faith that brought a child out of the wreckage of war.

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A memoir from one of the Lost Girls of Sudan.

Deng was born in South Sudan, and the first few years of her life were relatively peaceful. She enjoyed her grandmother’s cooking, the ghee she made from the cows they owned, and the lush vegetation that grew around her village. When she was 6, the civil war that had been raging in other parts of the country arrived at her doorstep, and Deng became a refugee of the Bor Massacre of 1991. Her village was destroyed, and she fled on foot with other family members to safety. She spent the next few years living in refugee camps, eating tasteless maize paste donated by the U.N. It was difficult to find joy under these circumstances, but Deng’s strong Christian faith and community of churchgoers she prayed with helped her through her struggles. She also was able to attend school in the refugee camp, an act that ultimately led her on a path to the United States, where she was adopted in 2000 by a family living in Michigan. In this chronicle of her early childhood and subsequent years as an immigrant in the U.S., Deng shares, in mostly straightforward prose, the significant moments that changed her life. Not only did she suffer deprivation and hardship as a young child in the refugee camps; she also faced prejudice as an immigrant, struggling to maintain her Dinka heritage while assimilating to her new culture. Her difficult journey to adulthood and calling as an advocate for other victims of war makes for difficult, sometimes violent reading, but her story is important. In particular, Deng exposes the devastation of war on the innocent, especially women and children, who often bear the brunt of the brutality.

A powerful story of determination and strong faith that brought a child out of the wreckage of war.

Pub Date: Sept. 10, 2019

ISBN: 978-1-5460-1722-6

Page Count: 304

Publisher: FaithWords

Review Posted Online: June 30, 2019

Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2019

Categories:

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THE PURSUIT OF HAPPYNESS

FROM MEAN STREETS TO WALL STREET

by Chris Gardner with Quincy Troupe ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 1, 2006

Well-told and admonitory.

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Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.

Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.

Well-told and admonitory.

Pub Date: June 1, 2006

ISBN: 0-06-074486-3

Page Count: 320

Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006

Categories:

GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BUSINESS

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INTO THE WILD

by Jon Krakauer ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 1, 1996

A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...

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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.

A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor will it to readers of Krakauer's narrative. (4 maps) (First printing of 35,000; author tour)