PositiveChapter16Along the way, Lee spins numerous diverting narrative tangents decorated with his spirited maximalist prose, like a linguistic-savant carnival barker conning you into buying a ticket to a sideshow attraction you actually end up loving ... It’s a sort of ethnocultural role reversal that satirizes the perils of global capitalism and illuminates how the game of moneymaking can disrupt our own moral compasses, as individuals and societies, to the great detriment of an otherwise lovely planet.
Wayétu Moore
RaveChapter 16In the final pages, Moore brings 5-year-old Tutu back to narrate the reunion with Mam. Told in spare, childlike prose, the scene is vivid and heart-shattering. (Full disclosure: When I read that section aloud to my husband, we both cried.) Moore’s gorgeously rendered memoir is an exhortation not to surrender to tragedy fatigue. There are so many stories of war and forced migration that they may, at a distance, blur into sameness. But zoom in and those abstractions sharpen into singular stories, each one a complicated blend of loss and salvation, tragedy and triumph, bitterness and wisdom.
Patrick Radden Keefe
PositiveChapter 16... two threads entwine as Keefe pieces together confessional testimonies of ex-combatants with his own prodigious reporting to put forth a credible theory about who was responsible for McConville’s disappearance and death ... he zooms in to the combatants’ stories to illustrate how, in a place contorted by generations of discrimination and bloodshed, ordinary people can come to believe that violence is a moral imperative—an idea reinforced by ritual and pageantry.
