Hamilton Bailey: A Surgeon's Life Book

Kidder is considered the master of non-fictional narrative. He lets his subjects tell their own story, in effect crafting their autobiography. In this case, his subject is Deo, a medical student who survived the bloodbaths of the Burundi and Rwanda and makes it to America only to face a prolonged period of challenges in surviving in Harlem. Yet, with timely help from key people along his way, he gains an education and ends up doing public health work with Paul Farmer's Partners in Health organization. His heart is big enough to forgive the perpetrators, and those who helped Deo come to feel more benefits from him than they render. These include an ex-nun working among the homeless and a Soho couple, a sociology professor and his artist wife. The task of understanding the origins of the mass killings in these small countries is confounded by the Tsutsi and Hutu sharing the same language, religion, and, for the most part, culture. Kidder infers that the German and Belgian colonists helped establish the myth of differences between the groups that fueled a history of antagonism. Kidder doesn't dump Deo's personal witnessing of the genocide in a painful lump on the reader, but slowly intersperses the experiences from Deo's memories with his progress of recovery in America. This is a powerful and uplifting story told well.