Hvad er dette hvad

If you want to learn about the Lost Boys of Sudan, this is a book for you. One of its many emotional points is that the violent but meaningful life in the refugee camp appears to be more valuable than the life in Atlanta where Valentino is essentially left to his own devices when aid is no longer available to him and to others in similar situations. ( )

Eggers schreef de 'autobiografie' van Valentino Achak Deng, die als jongen de burgeroorlog in Zuid-Soedan overleefde. Gescheiden van zijn ouders vluchtte Deng met honderden andere ‘lost boys’ te voet naar Ethiopië, later Kenia, om na een verblijf in vluchtelingenkampen uiteindelijk in de VS asiel te ontvangen. Eggers heeft er vier jaar over gedaan om de belevenissen van Deng op te schrijven. Het is een keten van levensbedreigende situaties: oorlogsgeweld, maar ook honger, hitte, leeuwen en hyena’s eisten hun tol. De helletocht door Soedan heeft Deng niet gebroken. Dankzij Eggers maken wij kennis met de levenskracht van een kwetsbaar mens die model kan staan voor ons allen. ( )

An amazing first hand account of a lost boy from Sudan. I highly recommend this book. ( )

Amazing. I couldn't put it down. I even missed my stop on the train the other day because I was so engrossed, and I didn't even care. One of the best books I've read in a long time. ( )

A the tail-end of my college experience, the campus craze to "Save Darfur" popularized. The coalitions that came together at my school to speak out against the atrocities committed in Sudan's Darfur region were varied: campus Christian groups and College Republicans as well as Fair Trade boosters and liberals. I found their politics to be abhorrent and irresponsible. In 2006, the US was three years into a war on Iraq which had recently been recast as a humanitarian intervention. On the one hand, the Christians and the Republicans gathered to chant, "Out of Iraq, Into Sudan!" at tiny, ignored rallies. On the other hand, paternalizing liberals begged the campus to save the poor Africans from violence by Raising Awareness (TM). These threads of white supremacy throughout the "Save Darfur" campaigns gave me compassion fatigue. I didn't consciously avoid becoming better informed about refugee struggles in Africa, but I never bothered to try to understand them either. I'm not proud of my reactionary thought pattern. I saw idiots saying dumb shit about things towards with I should be sympathetic and I ignored that towards which I should have been sympathetic.

It is therefore embarrassing that almost all of what I know about the Sudan is from a book written by a white hipster writer who streamlined the autobiography of Valentino Achak Deng, an actual living Sudanese man who had endured a thousand-mile walk as a child to become an international refugee. I am choosing to believe that everything good I drew from this book came from the recorded sessions he had with the author.

When it seemed like his whole life had lead up to arriving in America to enjoy the fruits of his decades-long struggle for a dignified life, the story of Valentino Achak Deng didn't end. That is what was beautiful about this book. With the goal of going to college, Achak is sidelined by the disappointment from his US benefactors that the Sudanese are not immaculate immigrant archetypes but actual human beings. He is sidelined by poverty and the rat-race that is the attempt to attain middle-class status. And he leads a normal, banal life.

I can't say I would recommend this book to others, but I'm glad I listened to it myself. ( )