Castles Burning: A Child's Life in War, and: Mountains Beyond Mountains:The Quest of Dr. Paul Farmer, a Man Who Would Cure the World, and: JAPAN: True Stories, Travelers Tales (review)
One pleasure of creative nonfiction is the way it lets me enter new worlds: those I've missed and those I hope to visit. Guidebooks and history books give me the facts of place, but it's creative nonfiction—be it memoir, literary journalism, or personal essay—that lets me feel as if I'm there. What follows are three favorite armchair trips: one, to war-torn Hungary during World War ii; one, to rural Haiti where an amazing man is creating a global [End Page 186] health revolution; and one, to Japan, as told by over 40 writers capturing their special moments in a culture where ancient ritual seeks its place in modernity.
While writing about my family's leaving Hitler's Europe, I read many books about those years. Castles Burning, a memoir that reads like a novel, is one of the most vivid, making me able to picture myself in that place at that time. "I begged, and often my brother obliged. In the dark when I couldn't sleep, Ivan told me fairy tales in a whisper." So begins Magda Denes's story as a Jewish child trapped in Hungary during the Second World War. She was five when her father left for America, leaving Denes, her mother, and her brother, Ivan, to fend for themselves. By seeing Budapest through her young eyes, we experience normalcy trying to stay afloat in an increasingly brutal world. Humor merges with great sorrow, small insults with great sacrifice, as the quotidian turns into increasingly dangerous turf that the family must negotiate to stay alive. They have help: from Christian friends, from decent strangers, from the Jewish underground—and later, after the DP camps, from an agency that helps them get to America. The book is a page-turner, full of scenes and dialogue recreated by a sassy child with savvy instincts. We feel the adult reality hovering, but it's the child's country we travel through, her voice guiding us with the spunk, anger, jokes, toughness, and loyalty needed to make it out of one world and into another.
I never planned to go to Haiti, but thanks to Tracy Kidder's literary journalism—and Dr. Paul Farmer, his subject—I feel as if we all should go to help, and soon. With these two as guides, we come to understand the headlines made by desperate people whose land was decimated, whose family life and traditional healthcare, destroyed. This is the country that Paul Farmer, as a medical school student at Harvard, comes to, bringing a vision of curing infectious diseases through modern clinics for the poor. Within a [End Page 187] few years, "on a treeless baked brown landscape" a three-hour drive from Port-au-Prince, there's a sign on a collection of concrete buildings that make "a dramatic appearance, like a fortress on its mountainside," and it reads ZANMI LASANTE (Partners in Health). It is the first of many clinics that Dr. Paul Farmer makes happen—in Haiti, Peru, Cuba, and Russia—to combat TB and AIDS among the world's poor. Kidder, who accompanies Farmer on and off, over many years, comes to understand a man who is a hero, but not a saint. Farmer is brilliant, quirky, charming, unbelievably energetic, irritating, and a master at combining idealism with its implementation. Kidder discovers this, not only in boardrooms of the powerful, but on narrow mountain trails, climbing with him for hours so that Farmer can visit a patient too...
