Product Description

In 1997 foreign correspondent Neely Tucker and his wife, Vita, arrived in Zimbabwe. After witnessing the devastating consequences of AIDS and economic disaster on the country’s children, the couple started volunteering at an orphanage where a critically ill infant, abandoned in a field on the day she was born, was trusted to their care. Within weeks, Chipo, the baby girl whose name means “gift,” would come to mean everything to them. Their decision to adopt her, however, would challenge an unspoken social norm: that foreigners should never adopt Zimbabwean children. Against a background of war, terrorism, disease, and unbearable uncertainty about the future, Chipo’s true story emerges as an inspiring testament to the miracles that love—and dogged determination—can sometimes achieve.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #302183 in Books
• Published on: 2005-04-05
• Released on: 2005-04-05
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 288 pages

From Publishers Weekly
As a foreign correspondent, Tucker had worked in conflict zones on two continents and seen death in all its gruesome forms. "The steady stream of violence had worn away my natural sense of compassion to the point where I could cover almost any horror but felt very little about anything at all." Then, in 1997, Neely, a white Mississippian, and his African-American wife, Vita, were posted to Zimbabwe, where the AIDS crisis was feeding an unprecedented wave of sick and abandoned children. "The scale of death, and the depths of misery it entailed, defied the imagination even for someone like me...." Neely and Vita volunteered at an overwhelmed orphanage in the Zimbabwean capital, where diarrhea and pneumonia were killing babies at an alarming rate. Nobody dared whisper the word AIDS, though its specter hung over every crib. Here, Neely and Vita met Chipo, a desperately sick baby girl who had been abandoned under a tree. With temporary permission to take her home, Neely and Vita threw all available resources toward saving her life: round-the-clock feedings, good doctors, medicine and a clean, warm environment. She thrived. Neely and Vita decided to adopt Chipo, only to discover a slew of cultural taboos against adoption by foreigners-a white foreigner in particular. While Chipo grew healthy and fat under their care, the Tuckers negotiated a nightmarish bureaucracy that threatened to tear Chipo away from them; meanwhile, Zimbabwe was entering a period of civil unrest that targeted Americans and journalists. This is a gorgeous mix of family memoir and reportage that traverses the big issues of politics, racism and war.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From School Library Journal
Adult/High School–This is the riveting account of how two Mississippians, newspaper reporter Tucker, who is white, and his African-American wife, Vita, adopted a baby. Shortly after their marriage, he was posted to Harare, Zimbabwe, where thousands of children have been orphaned by AIDS and extended families are overburdened with their care. One day, a newborn was rescued from abandonment in the bush and brought into the orphanage where the Tuckers were volunteering. Chipo was tiny and close to death, but she latched onto Neely's finger, and he fell in love with her. The couple were told that it's practically impossible for foreigners to adopt a Zimbabwean baby, but they decided to try. Neely traveled around Africa, reporting on uprisings, massacres, and genocides. Intermittently, he returned to Harare to deal with the rigid, arrogant social-welfare bureaucracy and the horrible sadness of the children dying in the understaffed orphanage. Through patience, political savvy, and the help of sympathetic social workers, he was able to get the necessary papers to adopt the child. The story offers insights into interracial marriage, African politics, and daily life in a Third World country. Teens are sure to be fascinated by the Tuckers' experience.–Penny Stevens, Andover College, Portland, ME
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From The Washington Post

While a reporter for the Detroit Free Press in the 1990s, Neely Tucker chronicled some of the world's grimmest conflicts in Bosnia, Iraq, Sierra Leone and Rwanda, among many other places. Like other foreign correspondents with a reserved front-row seat to mayhem, Tucker paid an emotional price. "The steady stream of violence had worn away my natural sense of compassion to the point where I could cover almost any horror but felt very little about anything at all," he writes in his memoir, Love in the Driest Season.

In 1997, Tucker, a white native of Mississippi, and his wife, Vita, an African-American woman from Detroit, relocated to yet another bleak place. Zimbabwe was ravaged by AIDS and overwhelmed by a growing deluge of orphaned children. In the capital city of Harare, their new home, the Tuckers volunteered at Chinyaradzo Children's Home, an orphanage where infants were dying with appalling regularity from diarrhea and dehydration. AIDS, though also a likely culprit, was rarely mentioned.

One of the children at Chinyaradzo was a gravely sick infant girl named Chipo. (The name means "gift" in Shona.) Abandoned in a field of tall grass, covered by ants, the child was miraculously discovered by passersby. When Tucker picked her up one day, she clasped his finger with her tiny hand. This simplest of gestures sparked an emotional reawakening for the veteran journalist and goes to the heart of this potent and stirring new memoir.

Tucker's writing is taut and vivid as he narrates his and his wife's tumultuous quest to adopt Chipo. The stakes were enormously high: A doctor told the Tuckers, who were allowed to care for the infant temporarily, that if she were returned to the orphanage, she would almost certainly die.

In a postcolonial country sinking into social and economic despair, where an unspoken rule dictated that foreigners couldn't adopt Zimbabwean children and where President Robert Mugabe was stoking a virulent xenophobia, the Tuckers' task became Sisyphean. Chief among the obstacles was a maddening child-welfare system that seemed bent on thwarting them at every turn. Caseworkers evaded them. Their files were intentionally lost. They were accused of bribery. As a testament to Tucker's skillful pacing, this tale of negotiating a Kafkaesque bureaucracy, which could have descended into somnolent tedium, reads instead like high drama with a dose of Grisham-style suspense.

This book is billed as "A Family Memoir," but it is a cross between a foreign correspondent's dispatches and a family tale. Nor is Love in the Driest Season etched with the literary filigree that marks other books in the genre. But that does not diminish its importance and certainly not its readability. Ultimately it is the story of the evolution of a mother and father, whose determination to save a doomed child makes that child theirs.

We learn that Tucker's and Vita's lives had been shaped in one way or another by racism. "I had been raised in the heart of the most racist state in America, and as a child, I had accepted the perverse as normal," Tucker writes. Vita's father had escaped the Jim Crow south of Alabama to move to the industrial north. Their experiences helped them to understand the brutal legacy of white rule in Zimbabwe -- the country won independence in 1980 -- but not to get beyond being branded as foreigners.

Soon after the Tuckers began caring for Chipo, Neely Tucker was sent on assignment to cover an uprising in the Democratic Republic of Congo. His dispatches from there and other trouble spots around Africa, interspersed throughout the narrative, form a nightmarish tableau. A description of families trying to find their relatives at a Nairobi morgue, after the bombing of the U.S. embassy there in 1998, is particularly haunting.

Tucker, now a reporter for The Washington Post, captures the horror of such episodes, as well as the growing tension between the requirements of his job and his new role as a father. "I found myself trying to say, again and again, that I would not have traveled if I had known she had been so desperately ill, but it seemed flat and defensive, if not just a lie; who was I kidding? Vita knew better than anyone that my job defined my life. It wasn't a paycheck. It was all of me, a careening mixture of energy, creativity and curiosity. It was my drug."

After freedom fighter-turned-strongman Robert Mugabe ordered a crackdown on journalists and Tucker realized that his status as the only American staff correspondent in Zimbabwe could jeopardize the adoption, the obsessive reporter had to make a choice: keep his job or save his daughter. His decision is reflected in the chapter title "Choosing Chipo," but one suspects it wasn't that hard for him to make. There is, however, clearly a sense that Tucker reached a turning point, shedding an old mantle and emerging a new man. Finally, the Tuckers found an advocate, and ultimately they prevailed in their attempts to keep Chipo -- just days before a political crisis engulfed the country.

For all the virtues of Tucker's lean narrative, I felt there were a few places he could have lingered longer. We are told that Chipo precipitates a "family rapprochement" between Tucker and his estranged parents, who boycotted his wedding because of their own prejudice; although striking, the episode is far too brief. We don't have enough explanation of how, as he declares, "race, the defining issue of life in Mississippi, suddenly became a minor thing." Such quibbles aside, Tucker has written an extraordinary book of immense feeling and significant social relevance. Love in the Driest Season challenges anyone -- even those numbed by the world's abundant cruelty -- not to care.

Reviewed by Adam Fifield

Copyright 2004, The Washington Post Co. All Rights Reserved.

Customer Reviews

The Lengths To Save A Child
Neely Tucker's story of how he and his wife came to adopt an ailing African child proves the adage that the heart knows no boundries.
The book works so sucessfully on three distinct levels:
-Race and prejudice both in the United States and in Africa.
-The mounting tension and political termoil gripping the AIDS ravaged country.
-And most prominantly as a simple love story between a girl and her caretakers, and what they will undertake to save her.
A moving, exhausting, yet exhilarating book.

Great book
"By noon, the ants had found the girl-child."

From the first paragraph, this book had us hooked. Not only is it a great story, but very well written. My wife and I are in a similar situation, living in Africa and trying to adopt a child we've had for years, and the book seems pretty realistic to us. Of note, the author is neither cynical nor romantic about his family's experiences, and gives us a very good picture of the struggles of his heart as well as the external struggle for adoption.

Great story of love across color lines
Neely Tucker, a writer for the Washington Post , details his travels in Africa as a correspondent for the Detroit Times with his African American wife and their struggle to adopt a baby from Zimbabwe. This is a truly heartwarming story that wraps you up in their family struggles and at the end you hope the author writes a sequel so you can hear more about their life together.