Here’s an idea:

Turn off your TV sets and radios.

Stop reading about ‘tea parties,’ town hall meetings, death panels, and other supposed madnesses in your newspapers, magazines, and on line.

Put aside your own struggles and worries for a bit.

Go to a bookstore and buy Tracy Kidder’s new non-fiction Strength in What Remains.

Lose yourself in this incredible true story of a young medical student (Deo) who survives six months of civil war and genocide in his country, Burundi. 

Follow him and his $200 to NYC where he lands with no friends, no English, and no prospects. Follow Deo and his nightmares that continue to haunt him from Burundi to the US.

Meet the folks who help him survive, a baggage handler at Kennedy Airport, a former nun, and an aging couple living in SoHo.

Follow him from his life in Harlem tenements to his ‘camping out’ in Central Park, from his consideration of suicide to finding a home with a remarkable couple, Nancy & Charles Wolf. 

Follow him through a side of NYC that is in front of us but that we do not really see.

Follow him from his job as a delivery boy to his studies at Columbia University (he also pursues study at Dartmouth Medical School and at Harvard’s School of Public Health).

And if that doesn’t already sound fictitious enough, continue to follow him in his work with Paul Farmer (the Mountains Beyond Mountains doctor who established Partners in Health).

Go with Deo back to Burundi and Rwanda, both to revisit the places of his nightmares and to learn about the causes of man’s inhumanity to man, to begin to understand the Hutu-Tutsi conflicts.

And then rejoice as Deo successfully builds a clinic in the small town in Burundi where his parents lived, a clinic that treats 20,000 patients in its first year of its existence, including both Hutus and Tutsis.

This amazing story is many stories:

It’s an account of one person’s survival in two jungles, Burundi and NYC.

It’s an account of perseverance and the importance of chance and of luck.

It’s an account of goodwill and charity and individuals’ giving of themselves.

It’s an account of the alternatives to man’s inhumanity to man.

It also seeks to explain how that inhumanity can exist.

It is an optimistic accounting of a life that seems too horrible to imagine.

Yet Kidder does all of this without lingering on the horrors and insanity that Deo experiences.

Kidder, who writes somewhat in the tradition of John McPhee, takes you along in this story with his wonderful eyes, ears, and ability to write, and, occasionally, with humor. His descriptions, explanations, and insights remain with you.

There have been a number of books recently that tell similar stories, David Egger’s What is the What, Ismael Beah’s A Long Way Gone, and Emannual Jal’s War Child.  All are worth reading.

Strength in What Remains is the best of them all.

It teaches without preaching.

It shows how individuals can make a difference.

It gives us a perspective on life

                                                    *          *          *

(Kidder will be at Politics & Prose Bookstore in DC on Tues., Sept. 15 at 7 PM)