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CHILDREN ARE DIAMONDS

Edward Hoagland

An African Apocalypse

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 schoolteacher in his late thirties who burns his bridges with the school board and goes to Africa as an aid worker. Working for an agency in Nairobi, one of Hickey's 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, 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 has written more than twenty books, including the travel memoirs Alaskan Travelsand African Calliope, the essay collections Walking the Dead Diamond River and The Tugman’s Passage, and the novels Cat Man and Seven Rivers West. He worked in the Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus while attending Harvard, and later traveled the world writing for a number of national magazines including Harper’s and Esquire. He has received numerous prestigious literary awards, and taught at many American colleges and universities. He is a native New Yorker.

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Book Published 2013-06-01 by Arcade/Skyhorse

Comments

Children are Diamonds is a compelling and adventurous book by a writer who has been great for a very long time and who has earned his standing as a national treasure.

Children Are Diamonds is the latest addition to a remarkable collection of books about the war in southern Sudan. Hoagland’s novel 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 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.

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.

One of the very best writers of his generation.

Written with enormous energy, skill, and immediacy, Children are Diamonds is a noble paean to love and endurance in the face of the very worst that we human beings are capable of doing to one another.

A gritty cinematic story wrapped in brilliant African detail, mesmerizing, from the unforgettable opening scene, on to the end. Quite simply, a masterpiece.