Review by Booklist Review
Journalist Sundaram (Bad News, 2016) examines the personal costs of covering a far-flung civil war. The author and his wife, Nat, met through their shared passion for travel, specifically in their jobs as foreign correspondents. Ten years in, they're living in a small town in New Brunswick, Canada, with a newborn when Sundaram gets the opportunity to expose a civil war moving towards genocide in the Central African Republic. Much of this book focuses on Sundaram's time in the landlocked nation, where rebels' response to a corrupt, violent government headed by a Muslim is to wipe out the minority Muslim population. The author and his travel companions face a series of life-threatening events as they attempt to document the conflict, while at home, Nat struggles with a colicky baby. Anjan and Nat each retreat into separate worlds. Upon Sundaram's return, this divide only grows, due to trauma, job loss, and isolation in their frigid, lonely town. The war story is more propulsive, but Sundaram's honest writing serves both the personal and political well.
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
War correspondent Sundaram (Stringer) interweaves the geopolitical and the personal in this riveting account of "the most isolated major war in the world": the ongoing civil war in the Central African Republic between Christian and Muslim forces. In 2013, Sundaram left his wife and infant daughter to report on the conflict, which began that year when Muslim rebels overthrew president François Bozizé. Sundaram's companions included an American investigator for Human Rights Watch, a Central African journalist, and a local driver who might be a government spy. In matter-of-fact prose, Sundaram details their journey into the interior from the capital of Bangui, collecting eyewitness accounts of war crimes. Tragic details, including mass graves reeking of disinfectant, are balanced by profiles of courage: in one of the book's most remarkable scenes, an Italian nun serves "as a human shield" for 3,000 people taking sanctuary in her church. Though Sundaram's wife, a former war correspondent, pleads with him to come home, he pursues "greater reporting" in the war's most dangerous areas. The narrative reaches a crescendo when UN peacekeepers arrive to protect the refugees sheltering in the church and Sundaram returns to Canada and discovers that his marriage has been irreparably damaged. 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. (Apr.)
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Review by Kirkus Book Review
A journalist reconstructs how his decision to cover a war in the Central African Republic led to the dissolution of his marriage. In 2013, Sundaram, the award-winning author of Bad News: Last Journalists in a Dictatorship and Stringer: A Reporter's Journey in the Congo, was living with his wife and daughter in Shippagan, a tiny coastal town in New Brunswick. The birth of their daughter eased some of his loneliness but also incited in him a desire to resume his work as a journalist. "I searched my past," he writes, "seeking work to which I felt an old connection, that had shaped me, and to which my link felt elemental, pure, necessary." Ultimately, he planned a reporting trip to the Central African Republic, where a brutal conflict was not receiving even a fraction of the coverage that it deserved: "Central Africa, home to several long-running wars, rarely made the first page." The author recounts how he met his wife, Nat, while they were both war correspondents in the region, so he thought that she would understand his passion for the project. Over the course of his trip, though, he found himself simultaneously gathering strength from their relationship and avoiding communication with his family about the dangerous details of his assignment. A near-death experience at the hands of angry rebel soldiers, among other traumatic events, led Sundaram to return to Canada in "despair," with his emotions "in a jumble." Admitting that his behavior led to estrangement from his wife, he still tried to "regain the internal peace that one's home offered" and "the confidence that our family would again find cohesion." 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. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
