Based on true life experience, Valentino Achak Deng recounts his life as a refugee from the Sudanese civil war. Starting with his life in America, What is the What traces Achak's story back to his native village of Marial Bai and his exodus through Ethiopia and Kenya. Told with clarity, humor, and unflinchingly, this tale defines the strength and resilience of the human spirit.
Appeals: Framed with a robbery experience while living in the States, readers unfamiliar with the subject and with Sudan are given a gateway to another part of the world. Amazing sense of closeness to the narrator. While enduring unthinkable hardship, any reader can relate to Achak's universal feelings of confusion, hope, love, crushes, friendship, loss and survival.
Want to read more about the effects of war and the lives of refugees? Try reading A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier by Ishmael Beah or The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini.
Eggers, Dave. What is the What. 2006. 538 pages.
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