What is the What
by Dave Eggers
|
List Price: Our Price: $7.92 You Save: $8.08 (50%) Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days Buy Used: from $0.01 (click here) Category: Book See more book details and other editions |
|---|
Book Reviews of What is the What
Book Review: A fictional autobiography with lots of important truths.
Summary: 5 Stars
I can't believe this book isn't at the top of the best selling lists. It is easy to read, engaging, informative, and eye-opening. My view of the world around me will be forever changed for reading this book.
This is not a true autobiography, but a fictionalized story told by Dave Eggers about the life of Valentino Achak Deng, one of the Lost Boys of Sudan. It spans about a twenty year period in Deng's life, from when he was a young boy in Southern Sudan, thru the years he spent in refuge camps in Ethiopia and Kenya, and his years living in Atlanta. Eggers has admitted to rearranging the chronology of the story to make the story flow better. But as Salman Rushdie once said, "Fiction are lies that tell the truth." There are lots of truths in this fictional tale.
I average a book a week. I occasionally give a book four stars if it was truly enjoyable. This one earned five from me.
Book Review: Well worth buying and reading
Summary: 5 Stars
Not sure if there is much else that can be said about this book. I've had it sitting on my shelf for a while and had been meaning to read it. Dave Eggers was recently at a nearby bookstore for his paperback tour and so I went and was re-reminded how great this book is.
It's worth reading if only for the fact that it is fact-based on a real person's life -one of the so-called Lost Boys of Sudan. And, as Eggers mentioned in the reading, proceeds are going towards improving this young Sudanese man's life as well as other worthy causes. During Eggers reading he gave a slide show on the development efforts that some of the proceeds from the book were going towards. Very impressive.
But buy the book and read it not just if you are an altruistic humanitarian but also because it is fantastically well-written, funny, and insightful. An all around good read.
Book Review: Certainly Makes You Reconsider Your Hardships
Summary: 5 Stars
I thought that what Dave Eggers did with this book was a service to humanity. If nothing else, it made people aware of things that happening in other parts of the world. Sure, I'd heard about Sudan and refugees, but had no idea what caused it or why.
Eggers gives sparse background into the happenings in Sudan in the early 1980s, enough to understand the basics of the unrest. Before this book, I'd never actually cried at a book before, but his simple writing, and Valentino's horrible plights, certainly made me reconsider my life's hardships. Just when the reader thinks that finally things are going to look up for Valentino, something else happens.
The book was beautifully written. It made me more cognizant, at least, and more tolerant, and more optimistic, and generally just all around more appreciative of what I have.
Book Review: As Harsh As It Sounds, No Sympathy
Summary: 3 Stars
The book is dull and too long. Essentially, it is written in the same light as The Hiding Place and other such crisis books, yet without a God or religion. I felt no emotional attachment to the main character by any means. He is selfish, has an ungrateful attitude about everything, and is quite the center of his universe. When some event occurs that is devastating, there is no commentary to make us sympathetic. When something horrible happens, there is no God for him to cry out to. Without these sort of aspects, the book lengthens out to five hundred and however many pages of depressing yet unsympathetic material. I honestly would like to slap the main character for his attitude throughout the story. Such books are meant to either give hope or stir sympathy: and obviously this one was meant for the latter. However, it fails on oh so many levels.Book Review: Finally I begin to understand the mess there
Summary: 5 Stars
I join with others to give this book a big 5! It is one of the best I have read this year. I got it to try to understand Sudan, and even though Eggers labels it "a novel", I feel that purpose was accomplished because so much of it was factual. The most creative narrative I have read in a long time, where the story is mostly told silently in his head by the Sundanese man as he was being robbed in America in his apartment - a saga of fleeing the distructiveness of men's cruelty and greed, from Sudan to Ethiopia, to Kenya. On about page 200 we find that a lot of the problem was about oil - no surprise. But it was way more complicated than that. The strange title question is from a Sudanese proverb and the answer is not given, but is inferred in the end. An up to date, enlightening, well written, extremely interesting book.