Monday's Reviews Today: Stephen L. Carter's Latest & A Genocide Survivor

-- Publishers Weekly, 5/8/2009 7:46:00 AM

In Stephen L. Carter's "modest" new spy thriller, Jericho, a CIA operative goes to visit her former boss, and lover, now dying of cancer. Per our review: "Fans will miss the fully realized characters and mysterious puzzles of Carter’s more complex, less predictable earlier work." Tracy Kidder, using "an anthropologist’s eye and a novelist’s pen," delivers a "strikingly vivid story" in Strength in What Remains, about a Burundian former medical student and American émigré named Deo who fled the Rwandan genocide. Reminiscent of Dave Eggers's What Is the What, Kidder's account of Deo's life is a "profoundly gripping, hopeful and crucial testament" and "work of the utmost skill, sympathy and moral clarity."

Jericho
Stephen L. Carter. Knopf, $25.95 (352p) ISBN 978-0-307-27262-1
Bestseller Carter, who expertly blended social commentary and devious plots in his previous novels (The Emperor of Ocean Park; New England White; Palace Council), delivers a modest spy thriller, his first work of fiction not to focus on characters from what he has termed “the darker nation.” The sententious opening sentence (“On the Sunday before the terror began, Rebecca DeForde pointed the rental car into the sullen darkness of her distant past”) sets the tone for this minor effort. Rebecca has traveled to the Colorado Rockies to visit former CIA director Jericho Ainsley, who’s dying of cancer. Jericho’s decades of power and influence came to an end when he began an affair with her 15 years earlier. On arrival, Rebecca learns that shadowy forces fear that Jericho will reveal damaging Company secrets, and ]his life is threatened by more than illness. Fans will miss the fully realized characters and mysterious puzzles of Carter’s more complex, less predictable earlier work. Author tour. (July)

Strength in What Remains: A Journey of Remembrance and Forgiveness
Tracy Kidder. Random, $26 (304p) ISBN 978-1-4000-6621-6
With an anthropologist’s eye and a novelist’s pen, Pulitzer Prize–winning Kidder (Mountains Beyond Mountains) recounts the story of Deo, the Burundian former medical student turned American émigré at the center of this strikingly vivid story. Told in flashbacks from Deo’s 2006 return visit to Burundi to mid-1990s New York and the Burundi of childhood memory and young adulthood—as the Rwandan genocide spilled across the border following the same inflamed ethnic divisions—then picking up in 2003, when author and subject first meet, Deo’s experience is conveyed with a remarkable depth of vision and feeling. Kidder renders his subject with deep yet unfussy fidelity and the conflict with detail and nuance. While the book might recall Dave Eggers’s novelized version of a real-life Sudanese refugee’s experience in What Is the What, reading this book hardly covers old ground, but enables one to walk in the footsteps of its singular subject and see worlds new and old afresh. This profoundly gripping, hopeful and crucial testament is a work of the utmost skill, sympathy and moral clarity. (Aug.)