Surviving in the City, Against All Odds

Kidder, Tracy. (2009). Strength in what remains : a journey of remembrance and forgetting. New York : Random House.



Mr. Kidder’s subject, Deogratias, whom he calls Deo, arrives at Kennedy Airport with $200 in his pocket. He speaks no English and knows no one. Lost, homeless and haunted by nightmares, he squats in abandoned Harlem tenements and later sleeps in Central Park. He becomes suicidal.

“Better, he thought, to be in Burundi, if Burundi were at peace, than to live on the wrong, impoverished planet in New York,” Mr. Kidder writes. “This place made you feel like you were simply not a human being.”

Mr. Kidder’s book is a story about survival, about perseverance and sometimes uncanny luck in the face of hell on earth. Deo is a Tutsi who managed to escape the vicious civil war between his people and the Hutus in Burundi and neighboring Rwanda in 1993 and 1994. Being a Tutsi was a distinct liability; the Hutus were at this point killing Tutsis indiscriminately.

It is just as notably about profound human kindness. It is about the selfless strangers who helped Deo in America, who gave him places to live, helped him find jobs and ultimately helped him attend Columbia University and Dartmouth Medical School.

Tracy Kidder


If “Strength in What Remains” is slightly less immediate than those earlier books, it may be because, paradoxically, Mr. Kidder is too fine a writer. Like John McPhee, whom he has acknowledged as an influence, Mr. Kidder makes a fetish of the nonfiction writer’s craft, generally for the better but occasionally not. His clear, perfectly buffed, shyly self-satisfied sentences can be curiously distancing.

I'm going to look at his books.

Mr. Kidder doesn’t push too far, doesn’t linger on horror and insanity. You feel safe in his hands; he’s not going to push your face into the mire or insert atonal notes into his score. Thus you occasionally long for a pricklier, less predictable writer, a Paul Theroux or a William T. Vollmann. A writer acquainted with his own dark impulses, that is, who can let out, when needed, a sickening howl.

Excerpt: ‘Strength in What Remains’ (August 30, 2009)
The Sunday Book Review on ‘Strength in What Remains’ (August 30, 2009)
Paper Cuts Blog: Questions for Tracy Kidder (August 28, 2009)


A clinic in Burundi opened by Deo, the subject of Tracy Kidder’s “Strength in What Remains.”