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Tracy Kidder's 'The Strength In What Remains'

667 Words3 Pages

The United States has not officially had an official declaration of war, within itself or on another country since the second World War in 1941, but imagine what would happen if a civil war or genocide began right here in continental America. In Tracy Kidder’s The Strength in What Remains, the author describes the struggle of Deogratias “Deo” Niyizonkiza, as he finds a way to escape his home country, Burundi, while callous civil war rages on through the mountainous country. In contrast to Deo story, Man’s Search for Meaning, by Viktor E. Frankl, the author and main protagonist, a psychiatrist studying humans suffering, while imprisoned in the dreadful Nazi concentration camp in Auschwitz. Frankl 's theory of the strength that love can have on a struggling person can be connected to Deo’s inner fight to find his way back to his love of helping other people with medicine.
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There was no one with medical training to save him. Deo says after losing his friend, to what was later revealed as malaria, “I wish I could have some magic to get me friend back to life” (85). Frankl writes in his book that love can be a very powerful factor in a person 's life and, “(it) finds its deepest meaning in his spiritual being, his inner self”(38). Deo took Clovis’ premature death and turned it into a reason to continue in school to become a

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