Jeune Street

If you haven't already, please find yourself a copy of What is the what? by Dave Eggers. It's one of the best books I've read this year. The book is a collaboration between Dave Eggers (an American author) and Valentino Achak Deng (one of Sudan's Lost Boys) and it tells Valentino's story of fleeing his village in Sudan and later coming to the United States as a refugee. The brilliance of the book lies in Eggers' deeply empathetic style, which conveys an intensely emotional story without reducing the subject to a victim. Deng is fully human in the story, struggling with many of the same thoughts and dilemmas anyone could imagine for themselves -- but often in conditions that make the heart ache with sorrow. The novel (some bits are fiction) teaches more than a hundred news stories about the situation in Sudan and the people from that broken country who now walk our streets with us.

If you're looking to get behind the headlines in a more academic way, check out Alex de Waal's excellent blog called Making Sense of Darfur. It's one of the new blogs hosted by the Social Science Research Council in the US.