Just finished reading Dave Eggers' "What is the What?", a novel based on the life of a young Sudanese man. It is a fantastic account of what has to be the most amazing, harrowing, courageous story of our lifetime - The Lost Boys' trek across southern Sudan to Ethiopia, and subsequently to Kenya.
I've read a couple of other books on this subject, "They Poured Fire On Us From the Sky", which is a harrowing and poignant account by three of the Lost Boys. And "Beasts of No Nation" which doesn't explicitly name which country its child soldier is from, but which felt more like an academic exercise than a novel.
I had doubts about a white American doing justice to the story, but the voice really works. Eggers is one of my favourite writers. I loved "A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius", which is a memoir of him raising his younger brother after his parents die. More out-loud laughs than any book I've read since. The style is completely original and I thought it truly was genius. I also enjoyed "You Shall Know Our Velocity" (definitely not the same class as Staggering Genius though), and short story collection "How We Are Hungry". Eggers is also a pretty fascinating guy, filling the rest of his time with McSweeney's and the eclectic and essential "Best American Non-Required Reading" anthology.
Eggers is fantastic, but I was still surprised by how great What is the What turned out to be.
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