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"Lost Boy" John Bul Dau’s harrowing experience surviving the brutal horrors of Sudanese civil war and his adjustment to life in modern America is chronicled in this inspiring memoir and featured in an award-winning documentary film of the same name. Movingly written, the book traces Dau’s journey through hunger, exhaustion, terror, and violence as he fled his homeland, dodging ambushes, massacres and attacks by wild animals. His tortuous, 14-year journey began in 1987, when he was just 13, and took him on a 1,000-mile walk, barefoot, to Ethiopia, back to Sudan, then to a refugee camp in Kenya, where he lived with thousands of other Lost Boys. In 2001, at the age of 27, he immigrated to the United States. With touching humor, Dau recounts the shock of his tribal culture colliding with life in America. He shares the joy of reuniting with his family and the challenges of making a new life for himself while never forgetting the other Lost Boys he left behind.
Where's the outrage?
| Customer Rating:   | In a book-buying market flooded with simple, homespun philosophy and content-free theology, reaching back to Everything I Needed to Know I Learned in Kindergarten, to the Chicken Soup series, to The Tao of Pooh, and Living Buddha - Living Christ, to Deepak Chopra's entire body of work, right up to the nauseating Eat, Pray, Love, comes this pleasing book by John Bul Dau.
It's a true story of his life growing up in The Sudan, his travels and death-defying hardships escaping that country's civil war, his friendships, and his final emigration and fairly successful assimilation into The United States. Peppered throughout his memoirs are nuggets of African tribal wisdom and bemused observations about modern American life.
However, what shines through most is his indomitable spirit, his positive attitude, and his gratitude toward America for giving him, first, a "hand out", and then allowing him to work his way up through a series of minimum wage jobs, and finally to go on to college, graduate, and find a job commensurate with his KSA's.
Therein lays the reason for the ambivalent reception this book has received! If he had written a book highly critical of the United States and especially of the evil Bush administration, the liberal hoards, to include the mainstream media, would have carried this guy around on their shoulders like he just scored the winning touchdown - or better yet, the winning goal, in "the world's game", futball. He would have been brought up on stage at DNC's Mile High coronation confab, during Obama's speech, and been given a standing-O!
But the fact that he's calling the world's attention to the two million black Christians, who have been killed by light-skinned Muslims in Africa, is not nearly as important as say, Abu Graib, or "warrant-less wire-tapping." The latter two being true crimes against humanity!
For that reason I admire this guy. Also because of his faith, his work-ethic, his will to live, and his (almost) total lack of malevolence towards the murderous despoilers of his land. Furthermore he seems downright appreciative to the people of America who have welcomed him with open arms and given him a new lease on life; something impossible for the truly aggrieved, Reverend Jeremiah Wright, to grasp "Where's the outrage?" I hear him ask. "GD AMERICA!, GD AMERICA!, It's in the Bible"
I applaud his English language skills, they're better than my Dinka. Still, it did make for some strained reading. Overall, an inspiring story, well told, by a man who is happy (and lucky) to be alive!
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Great book as well Eyeopener
| Customer Rating: | | God grew tired of us was too me a very strong story it's hard for me to rate a memoir of someone's life reason being it makes me realize how u think you have problems and reading memoirs about people from different countries and what they go through there's no comparsion |
The Audacity of Hope
| Customer Rating: | Every comfortable American should read this book. It's a quick read and a moving one. As other reviewers have mentioned, even though life was horrifyingly grim for much of John Bul Dau's adolescence and young adulthood, the gentle humor he brings to so many of his experiences makes the book an easy read. More important than his humor, however, is the overwhelming sense of hope that shines through even as he details some of the trials he and others in the refugee camps experienced. It is that hope that continues to be seen in his life as he speaks to people around the country to raise awareness of those still caught in the misery the decades-long conflict continues to cause.
Read the book, rent or buy the DVD (winner of two major Sundance Festival awards), and then check his website to find out where he might be appearing in your area.
(You can learn more at [...]) |
Graphic and Poignant
| Customer Rating: | GOD GREW TIRED OF US
Reviewed by Charles Shea LeMone www.allwordman.com
In 1987, John Bul Dau was 13-years-old when civil war disrupted his peaceful Sudanese village and his heartbreaking and inspiring 14-year journey began. That night he was forced to flee for his life from Islamic soldiers, having no clue as to whether anyone else in his family had survived the attack. So began a tortuous 1,000 walk, barefoot, to Ethiopia, back to Sudan, then on to Kenya where he lived with thousands of other "Lost Boys" in a refugee camp until the age of 27 when he immigrated to the United States.
This graphic and poignant story traces Dua's experiences through terror and violence, dodging ambushes, massacres and wild animals. He writes, "I have witnessed my share of death and despair. I have seen the hyenas come at dusk to feed on the bodies of my friends. I have been so hungry... that I consumed things I would rather forget. I have crossed a crocodile-infested river while being shelled and shot at. I have walked until I thought I could walk no more. I have wondered... if my friends and I would live to see another day. Those were the times I thought God had grown tired of us."
Once he reached the refugee camp, four years later, he began his formal schooling. He also took on a leadership role, mentoring younger refugee children and reminding them of the strong values of the Dinka culture.
He arrived in the United States in May of 2001, and a whole new cultural journey began, as Dau was introduced to the modern wonders that American take for granted, such as the telephone, the light-bulb, running water, grocery stores and plethora of new experiences.
With the same strength of commitment and faith that helped him survive the horrors of war and its aftermath, he has since worked tirelessly to help the countrymen he left behind--while working two jobs at times and attending college. His goal is to one day work with the United Nations here or in Africa. Meanwhile, he has set up two foundations, one of which is raising funds to build the first medical clinic in the Duk County, where he was raised as a boy. The memoirs of this trailblazing visionary is one of terror and triumph, and the hard-won wisdom of a young man who has turned adversity into advantage and has steadfastly refused to be defeated by despair.
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from sudan to syracuse
| Customer Rating: | When you consider that John Bul Dau started the first grade when he was eighteen, scratching his first A-B-C's in the dusty ground of a refugee camp, his memoir is inspiring by any measure. It's hard to imagine anyone surviving what Dau describes, much less flourishing once he had the opportunity. By the time he started copying books from the refugee camp library, learned English and Swahili in order to understand the instruction, passed the Kenyan high school exam, then made it to Syracuse, New York, he had wandered upwards of a thousand miles over fourteen years from his bucolic village in southern Sudan.
Sudan is not only the largest country in Africa, and one of the most complex (572 tribes that speak 114 languages), it's also one of the most war-torn. The Darfur genocide in western Sudan rightly grabs our attention, but for twenty-five years civil war raged in the southern part of the country. The "white" Arab and Muslim government in Khartoum has tried to impose strict Islam as the state religion for the entire country, but the black and Christian south rebelled. In 2005 a Comprehensive Peace Agreement was reached.
When the Khartoum government bombed Dau's village of Duk Payuel in 1987, he fled with thousands of other displaced Sudanese. He was thirteen years old. Rape, disease, pillage, daily burials, wild animals, famine (they sometimes ate mud and drank urine), government troops, and hostile tribes did not prevent Dau and some 265,000 Sudanese from reaching refugee camps in Ethiopia to the east. Most of them were young boys and a few men, as women and girls could hardly survive, and so they became known as the "Lost Boys of Sudan." When Ethiopian troops started slaughtering them, the refugees trekked 500 miles south to safety in Kenya. By then Dau was eighteen. Nine years later he was one of only 3,600 Sudanese refugees in Kenya who were resettled in the United States.
Dau is the first to thank the many people who helped him in America, but it bears saying that by his account he was totally self-sufficient about six months after he arrived. He finished community college, entered Syracuse University, met and married a Sudanese woman from his Dinka tribe, started several foundations to help Sudan, sent most of his hourly wages back home, and was featured in the award-winning documentary film God Grew Tired of Us; The Story of the Lost Boys of Sudan (Sundance Grand Jury and Audience awards in 2006). It's only fitting that Dau's improbable story ends with reconnecting with his mother, father, and siblings. "God," he writes, "had not forgotten me after all."
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