While on vacation, I read The Burn Journals, which is about this 14-year-old kid who set himself on fire, and what happened after that. It’s a true story, and the author is going to speak at Harvard Bookstore some time this fall. The kid isn’t sure, at the time, exactly why he tried to kill himself, and he’s selfish and petty a lot of the time– as a teenager will be– except, of course, he’s also horribly burned, too. There were parts of the book that really touched me: his crushes on the nurses, his reaction to the fact that small children are now afraid of him, his realization– much later than you’d expect — that he’s hurt his family.
But really, compared to Ryszard Kapuscinski’s book about post-independence Africa, The Shadow of the Sun, he’s an incredibly petty whiner. Kapuscinski travels through newly independent African nations as a under-funded Polish journalist, meaning he gets malaria and TB and heat-stroke and hitch-hikes to war-torn areas on trucks, like the locals do, because his press bureau doesn’t have the funds to fly him around like the rich ones do. In the process, he gets a different view of things. He goes to villages where the richest man in town is the one who owns a bicycle, and where even he eats only one meal a day, and less in the dry season. He visits farmers who are careful not to work too hard, because if they do, they’ll die of exhaustion before the harvest comes in. He goes to urban shantytowns where everything is built of scraps, to refugee camps and unmarked shallow graves and empty markets and corrupt checkpoints. Really this is one of the best things I’ve read in a long time.
Apparently, conditions in Africa are better than they used to be, though. I learned that from Skeletons on the Zahara, in which Dean King relates the (true!) story of shipwrecked American merchant sailors who spend several years as slaves in nomad caravans, drinking their own urine and surviving on a half-bowl of camel’s milk every other day. Their masters get not much more– a full bowl, perhaps– as they trek north to ransom their captives. The relationship between the captives and their captors, who have no language or culture in common, who believe each other to be infidels and cannibals, is touching: they both, after all, take huge risks to travel unknown, trackless seas and deserts. Ultimately, the Americans are ransomed in Morocco, and return home as celebrities. They die relatively soon thereafter, of complications from malaria, dysentery, and starvation.
King’s story is both gripping and informative: for example, I learned that if you are trapped on the ocean with a limited supply of fresh water, you can supplement it with sea-water by up to 1/3, since that adds electrolytes you lose through sweat. Also, if necessary, you can drink the urine of a camel, and if it dies, you can drink the half-digested glop from its rumen. Potentially useful information come the apocalypse!
Secretly Ironic 