Menu
Bottom of the pile
10
/100
I Index Overall Rating
Readers
3/100Critics
17/100Scholars
Author:
Anjan Sundaram
Publisher:
Catapult
Date:
April 11, 2023
After ten years of reporting from central Africa, Anjan Sundaram finds himself living a quiet life in Shippagan, Canada, with his wife and newborn. But when word arrives of preparations for ethnic cleansing in the Central African Republic, he is torn between his duty as a husband and father, and his moral responsibility to report on a conflict unseen by the world.
What The Reviewers Say
The war story is more propulsive, but Sundaram’s honest writing serves both the personal and political well..
Sundaram’s greatest gift as a writer is a flat prose style, so drained of emotional subtlety that it creates a mood of intense creepiness. One gets the impression of a tale told by a teller with hollow and empty eyes. The oddly detached writing style serves the book well.
Sundaram’s descriptions of wartime Central Africa are riveting, and his political analysis is intriguing. The detached tone, however, provides little insight into Sundaram’s feelings about either the atrocities he witnessed or the family he left behind, leaving readers with more questions than answers. An introspective, emotionally detached memoir about war and family..
Concise history lessons explain how colonial rule exacerbated the conflict, and Sundaram makes the country’s complex political and religious landscape accessible. The result is a powerful study of the forces that tear nations and people apart..
