Word: deng
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...tall, quiet man sitting across from me in the diner has several names. These days he goes by Valentino Achak Deng, but in the African refugee camps he grew up in he was called Gone Far, for the hundreds of miles he walked when he fled the violence of Sudan's civil war. One girl nicknamed him Sleeper, for the time he was so exhausted he lay down in the middle of the road and tried to die. The other guy sitting across from me, next to Valentino/Gone Far/Sleeper, has just one name: Dave Eggers...
Eggers is, of course, a famous writer: he is the author of the bestselling memoir A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius. It's odd that the two men even know each other, but a few years ago Deng was looking for someone to help him write his life story, and a charitable foundation for Sudanese refugees helped him reach out to Eggers. Intrigued, Eggers agreed to a meeting, and the two became friends. Now they've collaborated on a moving, frightening, improbably beautiful book, a lightly fictionalized version of Deng's life titled What Is the What: The Autobiography...
Dave Eggers grew up in Illinois, and Valentino Achak Deng grew up in southern Sudan, but they have something in common: they both, in different ways, lost their parents. Eggers wrote about his parents' death from cancer in his celebrated memoir A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius. Deng was separated from his father and mother during the civil war that overtook Sudan when he was a child. He became one of Sudan's Lost Boys, a group of refugee children who trekked hundreds of miles overland in search of safety. He did not see his parents again for 17 years...
...Deng eventually made his way to the United States, where he and Eggers met and became friends. Their conversations together are the basis for Eggers' remarkable new novel What Is the What (McSweeney's Books; available Oct. 25), which takes the form of a fictionalized version of Deng's life story. In this exclusive excerpt, Deng silently addresses a young boy who is helping to burglarize his apartment. How do you make another human understand that you were a child of war? "Picture your neighborhood," Deng thinks, "and now see the women screaming, the babies tossed into wells. Watch your...
...practice shell 1,000 yds. directly to its mark. "I loved it!" exclaimed Thatcher. Peking Jan. 6, 1986 Life is getting better, fast, for many Chinese. Industrial production has leaped along with food output. Early in 1985 it was increasing at an annual rate of 23%, a pace Deng Xiaoping and his planners judged too rapid. They ordered a slowdown to avoid shortages and worsening inflation. In Mao's days, Chinese consumers dreamed of buying the "three bigs": a bicycle, a wristwatch and a sewing machine. Now the three bigs are a refrigerator, a washing machine...