Walk Toward the Rising Sun: From Child Soldier to Ambassador of Peace by Ger Duany and Garen Thomas (review)

With his father and older brothers as role models, Ger Duany craved an opportunity to test his mettle in war, leaving home to become a child soldier for the Sudan People Liberation Movement. Upon returning home, he amended his goals and headed for a United Nations refugee camp that would increase his chance to relocate in the United States. There culture shock, language and educational challenges, racial prejudice, and most of all, his own war-related traumas sent him on yet another odyssey to find a stable living situation. What looked like a dream come true—college basketball scholarships and an unexpected career path into modeling, professional trendsetting, and acting—felt shallow and disappointing, and he redirected yet again into activism on behalf of the new nation, South Sudan. Duany is best when showing rather than explaining, and readers gain a more vivid picture of the strong bonds within his family's polygamous household than the complex civil war, with its shifting political and tribal enmities and alliances, in which he engaged. Background information is largely presented via stiff, constructed conversations, and key points—such as Duany's path to U.S. citizenship and his father's sentence to death row for killing a wife—are frustratingly underexamined. Readers may want to look to Iftin's Call Me American (BCCB 5/20) for a more effective story of the African refugee experience, but the core message of Duany's fraught journey comes through clearly: "Being a refugee forces you to remake yourself a thousand times in a thousand different ways, despite your trying to hold on to some piece of yourself that you think makes you you."