Review: Valentino Achak Deng, a Dinka living in Southern Sudan, is seven years old when Northern Sudanese raiders come to his small African village, burn it down and finish off a massacre that began months earlier. He is separated from his parents, and in the chaos of burning, screaming, and dying, he flees into the forest surrounding his village. Where does a small boy turn to when faced with the dangers of wild animals, when those that would help him are slaughtered, when armed men roam the countryside hoping to exterminate his people?

Valentino finds other boys and girls like himself who have so far escaped death, and they decide to walk to the expected safety of Ethiopa hundreds and hundreds of miles away. They make up a larger group which has become known as the Lost Boys, and together they confront many faces of death. At one point he and others stand on the banks of the Nile. Behind them ring out the gunshots of those who would drive them away. In the river lurk crocodiles already feasting on fleeing refugees who chose to swim for it. It is incomprehensible choices like these which Valentino must regularly face in his journey.

Valentino tells this story from Atlanta and the reader is immediately plunged into his situation of distress. Robbers take advantage of his kindness by binding and gagging him on the floor of the apartment he shares with another Sudanese refugee. As he narrates both his trials crossing Sudan and the trials he faces in the United States, the reader is presented with all of Valentino’s deepest hopes, loves and sorrows. Within his story there is a compassion, a wit and a kindness that are miraculous solely for the fact that they can exist within a person who has faced the very worst in humanity. Valentino also reminds us of the very best that is within ourselves.

Recommendation: I have read almost all of Dave Egger’s work and his writing is unique. Those who have read A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, You Shall Know His Velocity, or How We Are Hungry know that his style of prose is all his own. When I picked up this book and began reading it, I discovered that the voice I had learned to enjoy so much was gone, and in its place was the voice of Valentino Achak Deng who narrated his story to the author over several years. This book is both a novel and an autobiography, and the heart beating at the core is the heart of Valentino.

This book, more than anything else, brought to light a conflict I had never really understood or even fathomed. The eloquence of the book transforms the story into a beautiful but vivid example of the type of conflicts that plague this world and end in far too much bloodshed and violence. While the story of Valentino’s epic trek to find succor amazes and distresses me, his descriptions of life in America were equally compelling. What Americans so often take for granted were completely inaccessible to this Sudanese man from a small rural village. His experiences with those who took advantage of his ignorance angered me, and his stories of those who helped inspired me. I hope that you, too will be inspired to help. Please visit these websites, www.valentinoachakdeng.org, www.sscw.org, or others like them for more information.

Eggers, Dave. What is The What. Vintage Books, New York, 2006

Currently Reading: The Fourth Bear by Jasper Fforde

On Deck: The Ladies of Grace Adieu and Other Stories by Susanna Clark