 |
| Kibera School for Girls, Nairobi. Photo by Nicholas Kristof/New York Times. |
And the award for single most infelicitous sentence in any David Brooks column in history goes to...
His drunken stepfather beat him constantly; when he was 5 the beating was so relentless, all the feces escaped from his body.I always thought "getting the shit beat out of one" was just an expression.
Today's column, "The Things They Carry", is not about people carrying things, as in Tim O'Brien's great book about American soldiers in the Vietnam War, but about one person who has succeeded in not being burdened by his horrible memories, so that it might be more appropriate to call it "The Non-Things He Doesn't Carry", but that is a minor quibble.
The subject is the Kenyan community organizer Kennedy Odede, who has just published a book in collaboration with his wife Jessica Posner under the title Find me Unafraid: Love, Loss, and Hope in an African Slum which is praised by Chelsea Clinton, Lonnie and Muhammed Ali, Gloria Steinem, and Wanjira Maathai, the son of Nobel Prize winner Wangari Maathai. He also openly acknowledges having been born in Kenya, so I'm confident he's not running for president over here.
