Strength in What Remains

Strength in What Remains
by Tracy Kidder [Biography Deo]

Kidder, who won the Pulitzer Prize for his book The Soul of a New Machine, has a gift for writing engrossing non-fiction, which is all the more compelling of course because it really happened. Strength in What Remains is the incredible story of a young man named Deogratias (Latin for "thanks be to God"). At 24 he was a 3rd year med student in Burundi, but as genocide raged through Burundi and Rwanda, Deo was forced into a harrowing 6 months of escape. He landed in NYC with no English, no contacts, and only $200 in his pocket. Through the generosity of strangers and his sheer determination to succeed, Deo goes from sleeping in Central Park, to a job delivering groceries for $15 a day, to being accepted into Columbia University. Yet this book is not just about his journey from unbelievable violence and despair to realizing his own aspirations of becoming a doctor. It's also a portrait through Deo's eyes of the genocide that killed some 800,000 people in Rwanda and Burundi, and how he is able to live with his nearly incapacitating memories of the war. I found myself thinking more than once that I would not have been able to survive what he went through (both in Africa and here in the US); it's a riviting and uplifting book. -- recommended by Steph E. - Anderson and Bethany Branch Libraries

[Also available in book-on-cd and downloadable E-book formats.]

[ official Tracy Kidder web site ]

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