But above all, I think, this is a book about coming to terms with memories. Deo’s story opens up one of those places into a comprehensible landscape-and also opens up a part of New York that is designed to be invisible, the service entrances of the upper East Side, the camping sites that homeless people use in Central Park. We hear about mass slaughter in distant countries and we imagine that murder and mayhem define those locales. I also hoped to humanize what, to most westerners anyway, is a mysterious, little-known part of the world. I hoped in part to reproduce that feeling as I retold his story.
When I first heard his story, I had one simple thought: I would not have survived. Then, in a strange twist of fate, he was, as it were, transported to New York City, where it sometimes seemed that his travails had only just begun.
First he made a six-months-long escape, on foot, from ethnic violence in Burundi and from genocide in Rwanda. In 1993, through no fault of his own, he was forced onto a terrifying journey, a journey that split his life in two. Strength in What Remains is the story of Deogratias, a young man from the central African nation of Burundi. Tom NissleyĪmazon Exclusive: Tracy Kidder on Strength in What Remains Deo's terrible journey makes his story a hard one to tell his tirelessly hopeful but clear-eyed efforts make it a gripping and inspiring one to read. Paul Farmer) a modern classic, Tracy Kidder follows Deo back to Burundi, where he recalls the horrors of his narrow escape from the war and begins to build a medical clinic where none had been before. Writing with the same modest but dogged empathy that made his recent Mountains Beyond Mountains (about Deo's colleague and mentor, Dr. That his rise followed a familiar immigrant's path to success doesn't make it any less remarkable, but what gives Deo's story its particular power is that becoming an American citizen did not erase his connection to Burundi, in either his memory or his dreams for the future. Against absurd odds-he arrived with little money and less English and slept in Central Park while delivering groceries for starvation wages-his own ambition and a few kind New Yorkers led him to Columbia University and, beyond that, to medical school and American citizenship. Deo was a young medical student who fled the genocidal civil war in Burundi in 1994 for the uncertainty of New York City. Amazon Best of the Month, September 2009: Strength in What Remains is an unlikely story about an unreasonable man.
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