Rod Johnson
Book Review
Strength in What Remains by Tracy Kidder
With only $200 and no English, Deo is struggling to survive on the streets of New York.
With remarkable acuity, Kidder puts the reader in the young man’s place, as he sleeps in an abandoned tenement in Harlem and gets a job for $15 a day delivering groceries for Gristedes, the supermarket chain. Kidder lets the story unfold, staying out of the way, letting Deo’s reactions and insights carry each page. Though the reader is informed that Deo witnessed horrors in Burundi, and is haunted by them, snatches from his past are unearthed solely to show what he relies on to survive backward glances that testify to his resilience.
The story seems to tell itself, but that’s never the way
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Simply put, the story ends too soon and we never quite find out what his protagonist accomplishes relative to his new life vision. (We leave him as he's just begun to attempt it, which feels premature after the significant and moving ground that we have covered with him to that point.)
The subject/hero of this book is Deogratias and his story is truly one of the amazing, only-in-America variety. A native of Burundi, he grows up in a rural area but is given the opportunity to go to a good school, gets into college and then medical school (the first in his family to do these things, of course) and then his world falls apart as the country comes apart in the civil war that was the Hutu-Tutsi genocidal conflagration (that has been much more welldocumented in neighboring Rwanda). He manages to escape the genocide, makes it to America and in the United States another incredible tale unfolds, transforming him from a homeless grocery deliveryman into a medical student in a little more than five years. The final third of the book is what he does after he has established himself in America to address the situation back in his native