Word: congos
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...blossoms, bound to appeal to your sympathies. Be careful. Later on you'll have to decide what sympathy they deserve." Fair warning, though what the reader must decide before finishing this turbulent, argumentative narrative goes beyond judging four white American daughters and their mother, set down deep in the Congo in the precarious year...
...turn in the weather whistles an ache through my bones, I stir in bed and the memories rise out of me like a buzz of flies from a carcass." The memories, eloquently relived and regretted, are of grotesque cultural arrogance, unraveling in a very small place. Rumblings of the Congo's struggle for independence from Belgium--and U.S. plotting to assassinate Patrice Lumumba, the new nation's first Prime Minister--are distant thunder in Kingsolver's tale. Her story, a symbolic parallel to the national upheaval, takes place in an isolated village. Nathan Price, an evangelical Baptist preacher, fanaticism...
...Dreams and Pigs in Heaven, in which social issues involving Native Americans remained mostly in the background. The clear intent of The Poisonwood Bible is to offer Nathan Price's patriarchal troublemaking as an example in miniature of historical white exploitation of black Africa. Kingsolver, 43, lived in the Congo in the early '60s, and fondly remembers the people and the terrain. But this is a novel, not travel writing salted with guilt. The author's strong female characterizations carry a story that moves through its first half like a river in flood...
...United Nations' 52nd birthday this past Saturday marked the end of an especially eventful year. The U.N. has struggled with crisises in Iraq, the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Kosovo. Secretary-General Kofi Annan's visit to Harvard last month underscored the University's global profile and the importance of the U.N. in responding to the changes in the international scene...
...Angolans will meet stiff resistance as they follow the rebels east," Mutiso says. "The jungle that covers Congo's heart makes communication with the west nonexistent -- it's a natural obstacle to any offensive." Then there's the matter of what will happen to the rebels, ethnic Tutsi in a country dominated by Hutu, if they lose. "The rebels saw what happened to those caught in Kinshasa: They were slaughtered," says Mutiso. "Surrender would be signing their own death warrant. Their backs are to the wall but as long as they have bullets, they'll keep fighting...