Children Are Diamonds: An African Apocalypse

Description

This is not the Africa of Isak Dinesen, nor the Africa of Joy Adamson. This is the Africa of civil wars and tribal massacres, where the Lord's Resistance Army recruits child-soldiers after forcing them to kill their parents and eat their hearts. The aid workers who voluntarily subject themselves to life here are a breed of their own. Meet Hickey, an American school teacher in his late thirties, an American school teacher who burns his bridges with the school board and goes to Africa as an aid worker. Working for an agency in Nairobi, one of his jobs is to drive food and medical supplies to Southern Sudan to an aid station run by Ruth, a middle-aged woman, who acts as nurse, doctor, hospice worker, feeder of starving children, and witness. Ruth is gruff but efficient, and Hickey, who is usually drawn to youth and beauty, is struck by her devotion. Returning to Nairobi, he can't forget what he has seen. When the violence and chaos in the region increase to a fever pitch and aid workers are being slaughtered or evacuated, Hickey is asked to save Ruth overland by Jeep. What happens to them and the children that have joined their journey is the searing climax of this novel. Hoagland paints an unflinching portrait of a living hell at its worst, and yet amid that suffering there is hope in the form of humility, sacrifice, and life-affirming friendship.

Edward Hoagland: Edward Hoagland has written more than twenty books in sixty years, including travel memoirs (Alaskan Travels--Arcade 2012, 2013), essay collections, and novels. He worked in the Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus while attending Harvard, and later traveled the world from Yemen to Antarctica to Assam, writing for national magazines such as Harper's and Esquire. He has received numerous literary awards, and taught at ten colleges and universities. A native New Yorker, he now divides his time between Martha's Vineyard and a farmhouse in the mountains of northern Vermont.

Edward Hoagland has long been both a resolute explorer and a preternaturally versatile writer. He s written more nonfiction than fiction, but what he brings to this terrifying novel I mean, in addition to his humane vision and exquisite craft is everything he has learned (as Graham Greene learned) from the world. The range and depth of Hoagland s travel books, and of his many remarkable essays, are on display in this novel set in Africa, where killing and sexual brutality are juxtaposed with humanitarian care. Hoagland s aid workers are damaged souls, but they haven t quit. In a world of unbearable inhumanity, what comes across in this intrepid novel is the power of doing the right thing even, or especially, in a moral outback. --John Irving The ferocious lucidity of Hoagland s language and the depth of his characters as they navigate political complexity, hellish violence, endless fear, persistent desire, and desperate calculations of survival make for a shattering tale of epic suffering, bitter irony, and miraculous flashes of beauty. --Booklist Children Are Diamonds is the latest addition to a remarkable collection of books about the war in southern Sudan that evokes the time and place with haunting imagery. Hoagland aptly captures the lives of Western do-gooders and opportunists lured by the adrenaline rush of Africa, evoking the closeness, and the randomness, of death in a war zone. --The New York Times The ferocious lucidity of Hoagland's language and the depth of his characters as they navigate political complexity, hellish violence, endless fear, persistent desire, and desperate calculations of survival make for a shattering tale of epic suffering, bitter irony, and miraculous flashes of beauty. --Booklist A gritty cinematic story wrapped in brilliant African detail, mesmerizing, from the unforgettable opening scene, on to the end. Quite simply, a masterpiece. --Garrison Keillor