Random House Inc
Price: $26.00
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TRACY KIDDER
chronicles one man's stupendous journey in
Strength in What Remains
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Harvard Book Store is delighted to welcome back Pulitzer Prize-winning author and literary journalist TRACY KIDDER to discuss his most recent work, Strength in What Remains. Strength in What Remains is Kidder's account of Deogratias, or Deo, a young man from the central African nation of Burundi, who arrives in America in search of a new life. Having survived a civil war and genocide, plagued by horrific dreams, he lands at JFK airport with two hundred dollars, no English, and no contacts. He ekes out a precarious existence delivering groceries, living in Central Park, and learning English by reading dictionaries in bookstores. Then Deo begins to meet the strangers who will change his life, pointing him eventually in the direction of Columbia University, medical school, and a life devoted to healing. "Told in flashbacks from Deo's 2006 return visit to Burundi to mid-1990s New York and the Burundi of childhood memory and young adulthood—as the Rwandan genocide spilled across the border following the same inflamed ethnic divisions—then picking up in 2003, when author and subject first meet, Deo's experience is conveyed with a remarkable depth of vision and feeling. Kidder renders his subject with deep yet unfussy fidelity and the conflict with detail and nuance." —Publishers Weekly (starred) “The journey of Deo achieves mythic importance in Tracy Kidder’s expert hands.” —Adrian Nicole LeBlanc
"Read this book, and it's one that you will not likely forget. The story of a journey, classical in its way, but contemporary and very modern in its details. It's written with such simplicity and lucidity that it transcends the moment and becomes as powerful and compelling as those journeys of myth." —Jonathan Harr
“The reporting is impeccable, but it’s Kidder’s great feat of sympathetic imagination that dazzles. Walk a mile in Deo’s shoes; your world will be larger and darker for it.” —William Finnegan (Cold New World) "Believe me, at the end of this riveting narrative, your eyes will not be dry." —Adam Hochschild
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Tracy Kidder graduated from Harvard University and studied at the University of Iowa. He has won the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, the Robert F. Kennedy Award, and many other literary prizes. The author of Mountains Beyond Mountains: The Quest of Dr. Paul Farmer, a Man Who Would Cure the World, Home Town, Old Friends, Among Schoolchildren, House, and The Soul of a New Machine, Kidder lives in Massachusetts and Maine.
Photo: Gabriel Amadeus Cooney.
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