[so vox is being a little bitch and won't let me look up any books on amazon, so I'll try to insert covers later.]
This is the type of book that made me really appreciate my English degree. It's technically written by Dave Eggers, but both he and the book's subject,
Valentino Achak Deng, claim that Eggers gets credit only because Deng's English and education were too limited to properly explain his story.
Deng is a Sudanese refugee, one of the now famous 'Lost Boys,' who walked thousands of miles to escape being slaughtered in a cultural civil war. The title refers to a folk tale he heard growing up in which it is foretold his people will always prevail until the what shows up. But what is 'the what'? No one knows. It kind of reminded me of the The Nothing from 'The Neverending Story' but in a far more literary sort of way. I honestly feel the need to write some sort of literary paper on this book even though I have no one to read it because every page inspired the extremely nerdy analytical part of me. Because, like Eggers other work, this is a heartbreaking work of staggering genius. And it says more about the duality of hope and apathy in this country than anything else I've ever read.
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