Strength in What Remains

3 uses

Ethnic antagonism, the bishop warned, had become "extremely acute."†

1 use

One couldn't take money for the milk, and no cow could be slaughtered for food, though rarely one might be sold to buy a piece of arable land or for some other truly important purpose.†

2 uses

As instructed, Deo read Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil.†

1 use

She took him to an odd little store, full of old-looking lamps and furniture but with a rack of shelves of old books, where together they found a bilingual copy of Le Petit Prince.†

1 use

Many families were obviously poorer than his, families without cows or enough food even in the bountiful seasons.†

1 use

In the second, the apartment was his home, and he was lounging on the sofa, laughing uproariously as Charlie, for my benefit, reminisced about those contentious dinner-table lessons in American idioms.†

1 use

The ostentatious corpulence of the well-to-do, the huge gold cross he saw hanging from the neck of a priest — "God knows how many people are dying in Congo in a bloody war for diamonds, for gold."†

1 use

The awning must have been there back then, already a relic of a defunct store, but Deo said he didn't remember it.†

1 use

But these were acts committed out of too much filial feeling, not too little.†

2 uses

His way of dealing with his memories had seemed to be hypochondria.†

5 uses

To Joia, the problem wasn't that Deo got upset at the way patents on drugs, for instance, left the indigent sick of black Africa bereft of modern medicine.†

1 use

They made Tutsis (and in Burundi, both Tutsis and a small princely class) into their intermediaries.†

3 uses

From Lonjino, Deo first heard about the onerous taxes the Belgians imposed, how small owners of cows or crops had to turn over the best part of their milk, produce, and meat to the local Burundian chiefs, who administered the hills for the colonists.†

1 use

...primary and secondary: colonialism's legacies (especially the propagation of the myth that Tutsis were a superior race of alien invaders); past and present violence that hardened ethnic prejudice and helped to beget further violence; political opportunism that took advantage of a largely uneducated population, imbued, some have said, with the habit of obedience; overpopulation, environmental degradation, and economic distress that led to competition for dwindling resources; the harmful...†

1 use

It was a gruesome and harmful form of palliation, and for Deo it expressed a psychological truth with broad application — that pains exist in layers, with the most excruciating at the top obscuring the pains beneath.†

1 use

Since the onset of civil war, Burundi's per capita gross domestic product had fallen from roughly $180 per year to about $80, the lowest in the world, and of course that paltry figure understated the general penury.†

1 use

Could anything be done to redress these inequities?†

2 uses

The Rwandan genocide was a carefully planned case of scapegoating, launched by a government of the majority against a powerless minority.†

1 use

A main tenet of French policy in Africa seems to have been the preservation of French-speaking governments at all costs.†

2 uses

Someone in the group had a transistor radio.†