Product Description

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #189208 in Books
• Published on: 2007-04-09
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 288 pages

From Publishers Weekly
A young American aid worker doing a three-year stint in a rural West African village works through his dislocation, cultural and otherwise, in D'Souza's promising debut. Working for Potable Water International, Jack Diaz—known to the locals by the Islamicized name Diomondé Adama as well as the wryly derisive Whiteman—details the pulsing quotidian of Tégéso, an Ivory Coast village in the neglected Muslim north, in a funny, credible first-person voice. With a civil war between Christians and Muslims looming, PWI pulls its people, but Jack stays on without funding or affiliation, working the fields and teaching about preventing AIDS. His cultural reportage is thick ("Because I didn't have a wife or children, I wasn't a real man to the Worodougou, and I took up hunting to compensate for that"), but despite stilted exchanges with locals, the real surprise of the novel is its fearless treatment of Jack's sexual relationships with local women. No matter who he's sleeping with, though, Jack knows his stay in the volatile region is temporary. When the war finally forces Jack to flee, D'Souza (no relation to political pundit Dinesh) skillfully counterpoints Jack's sojourn with his stateside existence, yielding unexpected motivations for Jack's work and his liaisons. (Apr.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Booklist
Jack Diaz is a young American relief worker in a Muslim village in the Ivory Coast, part of an endeavor to bring potable water to the impoverished villagers. As it becomes more and more apparent that he cannot achieve his original goal, he drifts into various projects from hunting to farming to teaching villagers about AIDS prevention to taking up ill--advised love affairs. Tensions between Muslims and Christians mount and add to the layers of cultural and political nuances that Jack struggles to understand. Christened Whiteman by the villagers, who believe him capable of magic by virtue of his white skin, Jack feels his whiteness more than he ever has in his life. As he penetrates the culture--but never achieves complete integration--he discovers a people not as simple and uncomplicated as he had thought. With war threatening to hasten the end of his three-year commitment, Jack's affection for the region and the people heightens, and he seeks forgiveness for his privilege and ineffectiveness. Vanessa Bush
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Review
"[Whiteman] is a subtle but damning response to the assumption that Western aid is all-benevolent." (Entertainment Weekly )

"The book has a very real, immediate, nonfiction feel to it." (Los Angeles Times Book Review )

"It''s the quality of vision that makes D''Souza''s novel notable and, for a first book, unusual." (New York Times Book Review )

"Quirky, funny, and seductive... capture[s] a shard of the host country in a way that NGO novels rarely do." (Salon )

Customer Reviews

Africa and all its contradictions
This book presents a segment of war-torn, third-world Africa and all its contradictions. Africa and its peoples are seen at their best and their worst - ignorant yet wise, ruthless yet compassionate, impoverished yet resourceful, war-scarred but hopeful. The tales told through the eyes of an outsider, American relief worker Jack Diaz, are compelling and thought-provoking on many different levels - this is the book's strength. To me, the book's weakness is Diaz as a main character. He is aimless, incredibly and shamelessly irresponsible, without his own moral compass, and has absolutely no idea what he is doing in Africa. A "perfect" or saintly main character would have been unbelievable and annoyingly patronizing, but Diaz's flaws overshadowed and distracted from what I believe to have been the strength of the insight into the lives of this war-torn region.

Westerner relieves his guilt and has sex holiday
Once again a good hearted westerner swoops in to selflessly help the dark savages and teach them civilization while making sure to sleep with a few of the women just to prove he's not a bigot. The book is quite cliche in it's plot. I wish Mr D'Souza, being a descendant of the aforementioned dark savage group, would have been as skillful with his plot developement as he was with his prose.

Life amongst not your own
The author presents a story of living in Africa, where he learns to hunt, have sex with AIDS infected prostitutes, give lectures about AIDS safety and just go about every day business. It is a book that shows how a person adapts, survives, is pretty much accepted by the loclas and then is pulled from the environment when the cival war erupts. A good book.