Review Of Tracy Kidder's Strength In What Remains

Steven Galloway’s novel The Cellist of Sarajevo follows Sarajevo citizens who are struggling to survive in their home during the genocide which occurred there in the 1990’s. These people become psychologically affected through living on a battleground, and in a life altering way. The very image of war is enough for most to feel disappointed in mankind, but watching your home crumble around you while being able to see the faces of those causing the destruction would likely make one lose any remaining faith in humanity. This is demonstrated in The Cellist by the agency of the bystanders

War changes the lives of each and every soldier who participates. It continues to change the way they experience events and the way their perception of the simplest things. Many veterans do not realize what truly happened until much later in life, if at all. Many live in denial of the truth, consciously or subconsciously, and many continuously remember their darkest moments. This is the case in “Salem”, written by Robert Olen Butler. The short story is about a man, late in life, recalling a past event from the Vietnam War. He remembers a man, alone in a clearing, whose life he ended. He starts to understand his actions and their true outcomes. The author uses symbolism, setting, and character to enhance the idea that one should always be aware of how his/her actions affect others.

Ishmael Beah was a boy from Sierra Leone who became a soldier in the country`s tragic civil war. He spent nearly all his childhood running away from the war and eventually ended up joining the army. During difficult times, Ishmael always held on to hope to continue his life’s journey. In A Long Way Gone, the theme is “Always have hope”, and is shown through Ishmael Beah’s hope for a better life, to find his family, and through the rehab staff`s hope for the boy soldiers.

An Ordinary Man by Paul Rusesabagina takes the audience through a journey of expression and of events that occurred during the Rwandan genocide. In the autobiography, Paul shows many emotions and several tones. The most frequent one was emotional. three direct quotes that demonstrate this tone are, “the person's throat whose you don't cut will be the one who cuts yours”(), “ I was a hotel manager doing his job”(190), and ¨their uniqueness was gone..loved ones erased with a few swings of a cheap machete¨

No matter how many times history repeats itself, people still have the tendency to not learn from their mistakes. This statement is relevant when discussing the topic of genocide. When a person hears the word genocide they think of the Holocaust. But really there are multiple genocides with at least an equal to greater impact on the world today. Most people don't even know what the most devastating genocide wads. It was the Native American Genocide. Another example of deadly genocides is the Cambodian Genocide. This was an attempt to form an utopian society. More so it was a ethnic cleansing of the entire Cambodian population. This essay will compare and Contrast the Native American Genocide to the deadly Cambodian Genocide.

In If I die In a Combat Zone by Tim O’Brien, the author shows how the hatred of war can cause remorse and sadness through memories. He uses his experiences as a radio operator in Vietnam war to showcase the range of emotions he was feeling at the time. O’Brien shows this by using memories and his comrades to paint a picture on how the war in Vietnam affected him for the rest of his life. O’Brien shows how he felt about the war through memories. Even though he opposes the war he still finds himself unable to disconnect from it.

These flashbacks remind him he is still a child, just caught in an impossible situation. Beah described “Things changed rapidly in a matter of seconds and no one had any control over anything. We had yet to learn these things and implement survival tactics, which was what it came down to” (35). He was eventually taken away from the war environment and escorted out of the village he was stationed at to the Benin home. This home was meant to brain washed child soldiers get the education nack that they missed out on and give them the right nourishment needed. For English they read passages from books, learned to spell words, and sometimes wrote stories in their notebooks. The teachers said it was just a way of refreshing their memories. Upon arrival, he and his friends are already craving the drugs their lieutenant had constantly filled them up with. It had been more than a month and most of the children had completely gotten past the withdrawal stage. Although some kids still had instances of vomiting and randomly collapsing, they were finally able to feel better. This is when their memories of war begins to soak in. From the withdrawal of these drugs, he begins to have reoccurring phantasmic nightmares and stressful visuals being followed by serious migraines. He would busy himself with work all day going back and forth to the nearby river and continuously washing dishes. It was the only way he could distract himself from the thoughts that would give him severe headaches. He tells a example of a visual dream as “In my mind’s eye I would see sparks of flame, flashes of scenes I had witnessed, and the agonizing voices of children and woman would come alive in my head”(103). Often times his nightmares would act as a barrier to remembrances of his family. It took him several months before he began to relearn how to sleep without the aid of medication. Sometimes

The memories that a person makes throughout their lifetime creates amazing stories. The book The Things They Carried by Tim O’Brien was based on memories from the Vietnam war. The protagonists in the novel is all the men that served and faced many obstacles throughout the war. The novel was written in parts of his memories from the war making the book nonlinear. O’Brien’s intended audience was soldiers and men, while discussing storytelling/memory and morality throughout the novel.

In her book, Immaculée Ilibagiza shares the power of faith in God through her moving experience of the Rwandan genocide. God saved her life for a reason. “He left me to tell my story to others and show as many people as possible the leading power of his Love and Forgiveness” (208-09). Her book proves that “with God all things are possible”. Her objective is not to give a historical account of Rwanda and/or of the genocide. She gives her own story. She attests that through God’s help, forgiveness is possible – even to those who killed her parents. Her book is meant to help people to let go of the chains of hatred and anger, and be able to truly live in God who is love. Left to Tell is a breathtaking book that proves the fact that “the love

Throughout the process of colonization, the Native people in Chinua Achebe’s novel Things Fall Apart, Silas Hagerty’s documentary Dakotah 38, and Phillip Noyce’s film Rabbit-Proof Fence, all cope with the on going struggles of being colonized against their will. All three of these sources tell their own, different stories about their same struggles. In both Things Fall Apart and Dakotah 38, the colonizing people create a sense of doubt in the Natives’ cultures; whereas in Rabbit-Proof Fence, the people fight to hold their beliefs by continuing to practice their own traditions.

In the introduction of A Long Way Gone by Ishmael Beah, he writes, “There were all kinds of stories told about the war that made it sound as if it was happening in a faraway and different land. It wasn’t until refugees started passing through our town that we began to see that it was actually taking place in our country” (Beah 1). During this statement Beah says that he is completely oblivious to the war around him. These people living in Sierra Leone had adapted to the war to the point where their perception had been altered. With this memoir he shares his experiences and obstacles he faces throughout the war to become a beckon of hope in this despairing country. Ishmael uses his social skills, timely luck, and emotional strength, to find the courage to overcome these adversities and survive in and out of the war.

Bao Ninh’s The Sorrow of War is a novel that is a personal view of the Vietnam War from the perspective of a Vietnamese soldier. Like the American novel “The things they carried”, this novel brings about the effects of war on people, and especially how it defeats the human capacity for things such as love and hope. Bao Ninh offers this realistic picture of the Vietnam War’s impact on the individual Vietnamese soldier through use of a series of reminiscences or flashbacks, jumping backwards and forwards in time between the events most salient in memory, events which take on a different theme each time they are examined. His main protagonist Kien, who is basically Bao himself, looks back not just at his ten years at

The end of the Shoah in 1945 did not bring a new period of human history absent of genocide. Rather, genocides such as in Rwanda illustrated the complexities of how to remember and rebuild societies. Since the end of the Rwandan Genocide, also referred to as the 1994 Genocide against Tutsis, Rwandans crafted new national identity, politics, development policies and foreign relations. Containing within each of these issues lies remembrance and prevention of a future genocide. This includes forming diplomatic and personal relations with a previously unknown people, the Jewish community. Jewish resilience, whether as a people or as a nation of Israel, after mass murder, pogroms, expulsions and the Shoah are seen by Rwandans as a guide for their

Naturally, life is a continuous cycle of experience and learning. Yet often times so much is buried in our lives that we fail to remember or recall what we have learned. Memories that range from miniscule facts to important emotions can often leave unknowingly from our mind. Billy Collin’s “Forgetfulness” shows how memories are delicate and fragile, and that the process of forgetting is one that is nonchalant. Billy Collins effectively blends subtle humor and irony with a dramatic tone shift to explain that ideas and facts that people think are important flee the mind, showing that nothing good can last. Although he refers to memories in a lighthearted, thoughtful manner, the poem gradually shifts (just

Imagine you have traveled to a distant country on vacation. Imagine you are an American eager to experience Rwanda. Everything from the green rolling landscape of hills, the franc, the mixture of English, French, and Kinyarwanda spoken on the streets, and the staggering poverty disorient and question some of the most ingrained values in you. This disorientation has the potential of becoming a transformative experience if one pushes aside preconceived notions of the encounter. Of course, you don’t have to travel to foreign countries to have a transformative experience, you only have to visit any of your local social institutions. Sociologists have pegged the term resocialization to mean the “tearing down and rebuilding [of] an individual’s role and socially constructed sense of self” (Crossman). Examples of resocialization can be found in institutions one would expect, like the military, but also in situations considered to be built on the preservation and enhancement of a person’s selfhood, like places of learning. Its effects are varied, depending on whether the reconstruction is manipulated to promote positive, negative, or neutral connotations of perceived institutions, values, or people.