Product Description

Tracy Kidder, winner of the Pulitzer Prize and author of the bestsellers The Soul of a New Machine, House, and the enduring classic Mountains Beyond Mountains, has been described by the Baltimore Sun as the “master of the non-fiction narrative.” In this new book, Kidder gives us the superb story of a hero for our time. Strength in What Remains is a wonderfully written, inspiring account of one man’s remarkable American journey and of the ordinary people who helped him–a brilliant testament to the power of will and of second chances.

Deo arrives in America from Burundi in search of a new life. Having survived a civil war and genocide, plagued by horrific dreams, he lands at JFK airport with two hundred dollars, no English, and no contacts. He ekes out a precarious existence delivering groceries, living in Central Park, and learning English by reading dictionaries in bookstores. Then Deo begins to meet the strangers who will change his life, pointing him eventually in the direction of Columbia University, medical school, and a life devoted to healing. Kidder breaks new ground in telling this unforgettable story as he travels with Deo back over a turbulent life in search of meaning and forgiveness.

An extraordinary writer, Tracy Kidder once again shows us what it means to be fully human by telling a story about the heroism inherent in ordinary people, a story about a life based on hope.

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Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #85 in Books
• Published on: 2009-08-25
• Released on: 2009-08-25
• Format: Deckle Edge
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 304 pages

Features

• ISBN13: 9781400066216
• Condition: NEW
• Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
• Click here to view our Condition Guide and Shipping Prices

Amazon.com Review
Amazon Best of the Month, September 2009: Strength in What Remains is an unlikely story about an unreasonable man. Deo was a young medical student who fled the genocidal civil war in Burundi in 1994 for the uncertainty of New York City. Against absurd odds--he arrived with little money and less English and slept in Central Park while delivering groceries for starvation wages--his own ambition and a few kind New Yorkers led him to Columbia University and, beyond that, to medical school and American citizenship. That his rise followed a familiar immigrant's path to success doesn't make it any less remarkable, but what gives Deo's story its particular power is that becoming an American citizen did not erase his connection to Burundi, in either his memory or his dreams for the future. Writing with the same modest but dogged empathy that made his recent Mountains Beyond Mountains (about Deo's colleague and mentor, Dr. Paul Farmer) a modern classic, Tracy Kidder follows Deo back to Burundi, where he recalls the horrors of his narrow escape from the war and begins to build a medical clinic where none had been before. Deo's terrible journey makes his story a hard one to tell; his tirelessly hopeful but clear-eyed efforts make it a gripping and inspiring one to read. --Tom Nissley

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Amazon Exclusive: Tracy Kidder on Strength in What Remains

Strength in What Remains is the story of Deogratias, a young man from the central African nation of Burundi. In 1993, through no fault of his own, he was forced onto a terrifying journey, a journey that split his life in two. First he made a six-months-long escape, on foot, from ethnic violence in Burundi and from genocide in Rwanda. Then, in a strange twist of fate, he was, as it were, transported to New York City, where it sometimes seemed that his travails had only just begun.

I met Deo by chance 6 years ago. When I first heard his story, I had one simple thought: I would not have survived. I hoped in part to reproduce that feeling as I retold his story. I also hoped to humanize what, to most westerners anyway, is a mysterious, little-known part of the world. We hear about mass slaughter in distant countries and we imagine that murder and mayhem define those locales. Deo’s story opens up one of those places into a comprehensible landscape—and also opens up a part of New York that is designed to be invisible, the service entrances of the upper East Side, the camping sites that homeless people use in Central Park. But above all, I think, this is a book about coming to terms with memories. How can a person deal with memories like Deo’s, tormenting memories, memories with a distinctly ungovernable quality?

In the first part of Strength In What Remains, I recount Deo’s story. In the second part, I tell about going back with him to the stations of his life, in New York and Burundi. So the story that I tell isn’t only about the memories that Deo related to me. It’s also about seeing him overtaken by memories—again and again, and sometimes acutely. But Deo didn’t take me to Burundi just to show me around. Giving me a tour of his past was incidental to what he was up to in the present and the future. His story has a denoument that even now amazes me.

Deo is an American citizen. He doesn’t have to go back to Burundi. But he has returned continually and keeps on returning, and, amid the postwar wreckage, with the help of friends and family, he has created a clinic and public health system, free to those who can’t pay, in a rural village—part of a beginning, Deo dreams, of a new Burundi.

This facility was a pile of rocks when I visited the site in the summer of 2006. By the fall of 2008, it had become a medical center with several new buildings, a trained professional staff, and a fully stocked pharmacy. In its first year of operation it treated 21,000 different patients. (The organization that Deo founded and that sponsors and operates this facility is called Village Health Works.)

Deo was very young when he went through his long travail. Several strangers helped to save him from death and despair in Burundi and New York. So did sheer courage and pluck, and also Columbia University, which he attended as an undergraduate. But when it’s come to dealing with the burden of his memories, the public health system and clinic that he founded has been the nearest thing to a solution. In the end, it’s neither forgetting the past nor dwelling on the past that has worked for him. For him the answer has been remembering and acting. I once asked Deo why he had studied philosophy at Columbia. He told me, "I wanted to understand what had happened to me." In the end, he received what most students of philosophy receive—not answers, but more questions. As I was trying to describe his effort to build a clinic, I found myself writing: "Deo had discovered a way to quiet the questions he’d been asking at Columbia. That is, he saw there might be an answer for what troubled him most about the world, an answer that lay in his hands, indeed in his memory. You had to do something."—Tracy Kidder

(Photo © Gabriel Amadeus Cooney)

From Publishers Weekly
Starred Review. With an anthropologist's eye and a novelist's pen, Pulitzer Prize–winning Kidder (Mountains Beyond Mountains) recounts the story of Deo, the Burundian former medical student turned American émigré at the center of this strikingly vivid story. Told in flashbacks from Deo's 2006 return visit to Burundi to mid-1990s New York and the Burundi of childhood memory and young adulthood—as the Rwandan genocide spilled across the border following the same inflamed ethnic divisions—then picking up in 2003, when author and subject first meet, Deo's experience is conveyed with a remarkable depth of vision and feeling. Kidder renders his subject with deep yet unfussy fidelity and the conflict with detail and nuance. While the book might recall Dave Eggers's novelized version of a real-life Sudanese refugee's experience in What Is the What, reading this book hardly covers old ground, but enables one to walk in the footsteps of its singular subject and see worlds new and old afresh. This profoundly gripping, hopeful and crucial testament is a work of the utmost skill, sympathy and moral clarity. (Aug.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From The Washington Post
From The Washington Post's Book World/washingtonpost.com Reviewed by marie arana In the summer of 2005, a villager walked into a district hospital in Rwanda complaining of abdominal pain. The cause was not difficult to diagnose: an acutely enlarged spleen resulting from untreated malaria. But the American doctors were unable to identify a series of angry rings, scored deep into the skin, that covered the patient's distended belly. A medical student from Burundi recognized them at once: They were burns. Someone, possibly even a parent, had heated a metal pipe over a fire and pressed its red-hot tip into the very part of the body that hurt the most. "Distracting pain with pain," the young doctor called it -- a common practice among the people of Rwanda and Burundi, who know a good deal about agony and affliction. That young medical student is the subject of Tracy Kidder's extraordinarily stirring new book, "Strength in What Remains"; and the gruesome business of numbing pain with pain is nothing less than a metaphor for the genocide that swept through Burundi and Rwanda in 1994, killing or displacing millions who had already suffered all the miseries of the damned. The story of Deogratias, a 22-year-old who boarded a plane in Bujumbura at the peak of the violence and emerged, many stops later -- alone, disoriented and ill-prepared -- on the streets of New York City, is as harrowing an account of human suffering as you will ever read. But it is also a miracle of human courage. In it, a man rises against all odds to achieve his highest aspirations and help countless others along the way. His road to success is hardly easy. The youth whom we first meet on Harlem's Malcolm X Boulevard in 1994 speaks no English. He is tormented by memories of brutality that beggar the imagination. He fears his family is dead. He would rather sleep under a bush in Central Park than in a drug-infested, abandoned tenement. When Deo finally finds work, it is for little more than a dollar an hour, carting groceries to the rich from the well-stocked storerooms of a tony Manhattan market. Perhaps because of his strikingly open face, perhaps because of his winning smile, he is taken in and helped -- first by a former nun with a persistent nature, then by a married couple committed to assisting students in need. Kidder, most famously the author of "The Soul of a New Machine" and, more recently, "Mountains Beyond Mountains" and "My Detachment," is a veteran of the dramatic narrative, and the real story he spins out here -- raveling it little by little, alongside the rags-to-riches one -- is a man's terrible memory of war. As Kidder describes Deo's flight through the ravaged countryside, we get glimpses into the inferno: a dead family sprawled on the floor of a hut, a mother's mouth stuffed with a dismembered penis, a baby sucking at a cadaver's breast, a militiaman tossing a child into the campfire. "It was impossible to plan," Kidder writes, "because he never knew where the dangers lay until he got close to them. The signs were obvious by now. Rising smoke meant burning houses up ahead, and wheeling birds a place full of corpses. Swarms of flies meant killings nearby. Sometimes he saw a dog trotting past with a severed head or an arm in its mouth." It's certainly not the first time we've heard heartbreaking accounts of the civil wars in Africa. But there is a touching intimacy about Deogratias's tale, and it forces us to look hard at the baffling history of his region. There have been so many wrong assertions about the area's ethnicities. According to Kidder, there is little discernible difference between Hutus and Tutsis. They speak the same language, practice the same religions, share the same tastes in food. More to the point: They intermarry, making it difficult to tell them apart. Contrary to popular belief, the Hutu and Tutsi thought of themselves as two before the colonizers arrived. But they understood the separation as being within a single people: The Tutsis were lords, the Hutus their subjects. The Europeans cemented the rift and called it a racial difference. The Tutsis, they insisted, had Caucasian ancestors, the Hutus did not. But the colonizers were gone when the large-scale killing began. It started just after independence, as the Hutus and Tutsis fought each other for control. By the mid-1960s, hundreds of thousands were fleeing Rwanda in a panic. The violence spread to Burundi, where massacres broke out in 1972 and then again in 1988. An uneasy peace resumed, until 1994, when a cabal of Tutsi soldiers assassinated the Hutu president of Burundi. Almost immediately, Hutus began killing Tutsis. Deo, a Tutsi, was working as an intern in a rural hospital at the time. Thinking he would escape the frenzy, he slipped over the border to Rwanda, but there the killing was even worse. By the time it was over, 800,000 people were dead and more than 2 million were homeless. In a region already ravaged by poverty and hunger, the victims were distracting pain with pain. Kidder by no means tells a seamless story. He lurches recklessly between Africa and New York and from past to present, fragmenting the natural suspense. He quotes Deo too frequently in the early stages of language-learning, rendering him childish, even dim, when he is far from either. Kidder tells us too little and then too much, glossing over material he knows better than we do and then over-explaining things we know perfectly well. He inserts himself into the narrative and indulges in inane asides. But for all these flaws, the sheer power of Deo's story shines through. We cannot help but be in awe of this gentle cicerone who survives war's ghastly labyrinth to emerge a better man. "Everyone has bad dreams," Kidder writes as he nears the close of this inspirational story. Indeed, Deo is still besieged by bad dreams, unable to free himself from specters that never seem far from mind: A farmer picks up a machete, a spear points toward a child's eye. Unlike the rest of us, who dismiss nightmares, he awakes knowing those terrible images are real. aranam@washpost.com
Copyright 2009, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved.

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Customer Reviews

Splendor in the Blood-stained Grass
Though nothing can bring back the hour
Of splendor in the grass, of glory in the flower;
We will grieve not, rather find
Strength in what remains behind; William Wordsworth

Rarely does an introductory quote capture the essence of a book as well as Tracy Kidder's choice of the above poem, and rarely does irony reach the intensity of genocide survivor Deogratias' name (Thanks be to God, in Latin).

The star rating system for books can be frustrating and misleading. Does a five star rating mean a new Jane Austen is on the loose? Does a four star rating mean a merely decent read? In the case of Kidder's Strength in What Remains Behind, my four star rating means a fascinating, thought-provoking, big-hit-with-your-book-club read. With serious books, and this is one, sometimes I get the sensation that I've put myself in harness, and in the effort to get the fruits of my labor I will be forced to trudge forward until the job is done. Strength in What Remains Behind is the opposite: once attached to the book by the first few pages, it will draw you wide-eyed and enthralled rapidly towards its conclusion.

Tracy Kidder's book, briefly, is the non-fiction tale of Deogratias. Raised in Burundi (neighbor to Rwanda), Deo lives a nearly idyllic life until the outbreak of ethnic violence in his country replaces Wordsworth's "of splendor in the grass, of glory in the flower" with a living hell that makes Dante's Inferno look like a pleasant winter destination resort. Deo, a Tutsi third year medical student, flees Burundi, arriving at age 24 in New York City with $200 in his pocket, the clothes on his back, and his will to survive. Kidder artfully alternates between Deo's fight for survival in the United States and scenes of the genocidal massacres that Deo witnesses in Burundi. Deogratias emerges as a complex and rich personality, more a testament to human resilience than a hero (though certainly not lacking in heroic qualities).

So many books, so little time... What will you get if you devote a few hours of your life to this book? Here's a sampling: a well told tale; repeated examples that support the premise that no matter how ragingly black the night of human behavior, some amongst us will light candles, and fight vigorously to protect that fragile light; a truly fascinating view of New York City's underbelly; and finally, you will get a detailed examination of modern African genocide. Kidder's description of the madness of the violence in Burundi and Rwanda is never pornographically detailed, but is nonetheless devastating. Genocide is an ancient human story, with Antarctica the only continent that has escaped its bloody stain. Kidder's somewhat labored search for the causes of genocide in Burundi and Rwanda may be the weakest part of his book. He cites one authority who claims that genocide in Burundi was caused by fear, as opposed to Rwanda, where it was caused by prejudice. Um.....is there an essential difference between fear and prejudice as root causes of genocide? Experts in primate behavior, including human, suggest that prejudice IS fear, of "the other". And do we truly care about whatever tiresome reason is being used THIS time to justify genocide, rather than about why it happens at all (consider reading Sex and War: How Biology Explains Warfare and Terrorism and Offers a Path to a Safer World) for an interesting take on human-on-human violence), or the profound slumber of the developed nations when it occurs outside of their spheres of interest?

Fans of Kidder's also fascinating book Mountains Beyond Mountains will be intrigued by the intersection of the lives of Paul Farmer MD (controversial and hyper-dedicated founder of Partners in Health) and Deogratias that is described in Strength in What Remains.

There is inherent tension in store for the reader of Strength in What Remains, and not just in the suspense of the story itself. The triumph and the tragedy of human behavior are contained between the front and back covers of the book. You, and if you belong to one, your book club, will be stretched between these two poles: Deogratias (Thanks be to God) and the unattributed quote "Tell me God, should I thank you, or forgive you?". May a rich discussion ensue!

Catharsis for us and the renewal of strength
Tracy Kidder's latest triumph follows in the footsteps of his masterwork, Mountains Beyond Mountains. The true story of Deogratias from Burundi to New York and beyond is for everybody, not for any particular special interest. The title, Strength in What Remains, is from Wordsworth's romantic "Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Reflections of Early Childhood". There are many other good reviews if you want to hear more of the particulars, so I want to instead introduce the author to those unacquainted.

Mr. Tracy, like John PcPhee and precious few others, is at the tiny top tier of journalistic authors of books, as opposed to articles of immediacy. Two years he spent listening to Deogratias tell his story and spent in other research. Years ago at the beginning of my technology career I read his "Soul of a New Machine", the story of the skunkworks of Data General Corp. at the dawn of mini-computers and client-server architecture. From then on I learned just to buy whatever he wrote. You teachers might start with his "Among Schoolchildren".

Mr. Kidder is the selfless writer. He does not choose topics to sell books. He has no ideological drum (or horse) to beat. He is not attracted to fads or celebrity, power or the rich. Those are left for the sycophantic, the mediocre, those unencumbered by talent and skill. He uses some sort of dowsing rod for profundity. He is also something of a phenomenologist, letting the truth bubble up from his uncompromising observation of people and circumstances. He does not editorialize or advocate. He does not pretend to understand more than he can show. But he introduces you to all the best people, besides his central figures, taking time to capture them fully.

In "Strength in what Remains, Mr. Kidder appreciates that he is is taking us places we do not know. So he includes all things of importance from different points of view. He himself does not appear until Part II, where he is finally comfortable explaining himself and his approach. He has a good historical section and five pages of sources. Here we meet again the sainted star of an earlier landmark opus, Mountains Beyond Mountains, the redoubtable Dr. Paul Farmer of Haiti and Harvard (Kidder's alma mater). Also, cameo appearances by Chaucer, Hanna Arendt, Primo Levi and St. Benedict.

It is instructive to point out that nowhere does Mr. Kidder mention his earlier book. He refuses to hawk his own stuff. He describes the episodes of Deogratias and Farmer without any mention of his own connections. He merely mentions Deogratias, Deo as called by others, at the library encountering a work called Infections and Inequalities. Deo must meet the author, I instantly recalled from the prior book. Sure enough, there is the great doctor himself, scourge of the self-absorbed. I almost want to say read Mountains Beyond Mountains first because you will wish you had, once you do. Besides, these monumental gifts do not last long. This is the kind at 3:00 a.m. where you are saying "Just one more chapter, dear" when finally a shovel turns out your lights. When I came to, I found her with the book, "just one more chapter, dearest".

I close with a short anecdote he tells of an Auschwitz survivor, who when asked about the blue numerals tattooed on his forearm replies that he always had trouble remembering his phone number. This book is an antidote to the bloated, grasping self-obsession which has infested our America.

With so many fine, worthy books we are showing each other in these pages, competing for our limited time, do not let these pass unconsidered.

Paying It Forward
I remember listening to NPR's in-depth reports about the genocide in Rwanda and Burundi. Horrified, I turned off the radio, but I couldn't turn off my imagination. Even though I admire other books by Kidder, I wasn't sure I was up to reading this one. I'm glad I took the chance.

Although Kidder's book is the story of genocide and the mad rush to survive, it's also a moving character study of Deo's family and life in Burundi and of his life living on the fringes of New York's immigrant population. The story of his arrival in New York City with $200 and a firm conviction that French is the universal language is an amazing journey, one which opens readers' eyes to the people it's all too easy to overlook as they do the jobs no one else wants.

Years ago I heard Kurt Vonnegut speak, and I'll never forget him saying that good fiction mirrors real life in that it is impossible to know the ramifications of individual actions in advance. Miss the bus? A Bad Thing in most fiction, but in real life the missed bus might prevent a tragedy. The story of Deo's survival would have been an excellent illustration of his thesis -- small actions, done differently, would almost certainly have led to his death. Had some people not decided to go good in the face of evil it is hard to imagine him living long enough to even reach the United States. Once in the United States, the kindness of strangers, coupled with his own talents and fierce determination, were awe-inspiring.

For whimps like me, I will mention that the structure of the book made it a bit easier to read about Deo's past than I had feared. The story is not told chronologically, so there is some small relief -- bits of horror interspersed by other narrative. The second part of the book is less intense, but moving, as we share Deo's return.

Deo's story deserves to be heard. How wonderful that Tracy Kidder is alive to tell it.