What is the What is this year's First-Year Book, following Chris Hedges' War is a Force That Gives Us Meaning.
This year’s First Year Book, What is the What, is the “novelized biography” of Valentino Achak Deng, a native of Sudan who fled that country’s civil war and settled in the United States. It’s a dramatic recreation of the conflicts that have raged in recent years in Sudan, including the war in Darfur, which is generally regarded as a genocide.
Dave Eggers and Valentino Achak Deng
The book was written by acclaimed author Dave Eggers, who is also the founder of the independent publishing company McSweeney’s. Yesterday, Eggers co-wrote a commentary piece for CNN.com discussing whether the Obama administration has done enough to end the Darfur conflict. The conclusion? They haven’t:
We have been part of an extraordinary social phenomenon over the past four years surrounding Darfur: the development of a genuine anti-genocide people’s movement. It’s succeeded in cultivating a number of true champions in the political sphere, led by three former senators: Hillary Clinton, Joe Biden and Barack Obama.
Now that Obama, Biden and Clinton are in office, and another fierce anti-genocide advocate, Susan Rice, is in as ambassador to the United Nations, we felt there finally would be a consequence for the perpetrators of the genocide, the regime officials in Khartoum, Sudan.
But rather than the kind of tough actions the these top officials had all advocated in their previous jobs and on the campaign trail, President Obama’s Sudan envoy instead began to articulate a friendly, incentives-first message that even Sudan’s president, an indicted war criminal, publicly welcomed. Our chins hit the floor in disbelief, because our chins had nowhere else to go.
Perhaps Eggers, whose latest work, Zeitoun, has received rave reviews, will touch on the subject when he visits campus on November 5. He’ll be speaking in Tydings 0130 at 5:30 p.m.