By Philip Caputo
Publisher: Knopf
Number Of Pages: 688
Publication Date: 2005-05-03
ISBN-10 / ASIN: 0375411666
ISBN-13 / EAN: 9780375411663
Product Description:
Thirty years ago, Pulitzer Prize—winning author and journalist Philip Caputo crossed the deserts of Sudan and Eritrea on foot and camelback, a journey that inspired his first novel, Horn of Africa, and awakened a lifelong fascination with Africa.
His travels have since taken him back to Sudan, as well as to Kenya, Somalia, and Tanzania, and from those experiences he has fashioned Acts of Faith, his most ambitious novel. A stunning and timely epic, it tells the stories of pilots, aid workers, missionaries, and renegades struggling to relieve the misery wrought by the civil war in Sudan. The hearts of these men and women are in the right place, but as they plunge into a well of moral corruption for which they are ill-prepared, their hidden flaws conspire with circumstances to turn their strengths–bravery, compassion, daring, and empathy–into weaknesses. In pursuit of noble ends, they make ethical compromises; their altruism curdles into self-righteous zealotry and greed, entangling them in a web of conspiracies that leads, finally, to murder. A few, however, escape the moral trap and find redemption in the discovery that firm convictions can blind the best-intentioned man or woman to the difference between right and wrong. Douglas Braithwaite, an American aviator who flies food and medicine to Sudan’s ravaged south, is torn between his altruism and powerful personal ambitions. His partners are Fitzhugh Martin, a multiracial Kenyan who sees Sudan as a cause that can give purpose to his directionless life, and Wesley Dare, a hard-bitten bush pilot who is not as cynical as he thinks he is and sacrifices all for the woman he loves. They are joined by two strong women: Quinette Hardin, an evangelical Christian from Iowa who liberates slaves captured by Arab raiders and who falls in love with a Sudanese rebel; and Diana Briggs, the daughter of a family with colonial roots in Africa, who believes that her love for her adopted continent might be enough to save it. Pitted against them is Ibrahim Idris ibn Nur-el-Din, a fierce Arab warlord whose obsessive quest for an escaped concubine undermines his faith in the holy war he is waging against Sudan’s southern blacks. In a harsh yet alluring landscape, these and other vividly realized characters act out a drama of modern-day Africa. Grounded in the reality of today’s headlines, Acts of Faith is a captivating novel of human complexity that combines seriousness with all the seductive pleasure of a masterly thriller.
His travels have since taken him back to Sudan, as well as to Kenya, Somalia, and Tanzania, and from those experiences he has fashioned Acts of Faith, his most ambitious novel. A stunning and timely epic, it tells the stories of pilots, aid workers, missionaries, and renegades struggling to relieve the misery wrought by the civil war in Sudan. The hearts of these men and women are in the right place, but as they plunge into a well of moral corruption for which they are ill-prepared, their hidden flaws conspire with circumstances to turn their strengths–bravery, compassion, daring, and empathy–into weaknesses. In pursuit of noble ends, they make ethical compromises; their altruism curdles into self-righteous zealotry and greed, entangling them in a web of conspiracies that leads, finally, to murder. A few, however, escape the moral trap and find redemption in the discovery that firm convictions can blind the best-intentioned man or woman to the difference between right and wrong. Douglas Braithwaite, an American aviator who flies food and medicine to Sudan’s ravaged south, is torn between his altruism and powerful personal ambitions. His partners are Fitzhugh Martin, a multiracial Kenyan who sees Sudan as a cause that can give purpose to his directionless life, and Wesley Dare, a hard-bitten bush pilot who is not as cynical as he thinks he is and sacrifices all for the woman he loves. They are joined by two strong women: Quinette Hardin, an evangelical Christian from Iowa who liberates slaves captured by Arab raiders and who falls in love with a Sudanese rebel; and Diana Briggs, the daughter of a family with colonial roots in Africa, who believes that her love for her adopted continent might be enough to save it. Pitted against them is Ibrahim Idris ibn Nur-el-Din, a fierce Arab warlord whose obsessive quest for an escaped concubine undermines his faith in the holy war he is waging against Sudan’s southern blacks. In a harsh yet alluring landscape, these and other vividly realized characters act out a drama of modern-day Africa. Grounded in the reality of today’s headlines, Acts of Faith is a captivating novel of human complexity that combines seriousness with all the seductive pleasure of a masterly thriller.
Summary: You can feel the sand in your teeth
Rating: 4
I would rank this as Caputo's best fiction to date, slightly above Horn of Africa yet below his biographies A Rumor of War and Means of Escape. The book centers around an unlikely group of misfits in post-colonial Sudan: Douglas, a Gulf War vet with an ideological streak, Wesley, a rough-and-tumble pilot with his eye on the bottom line, and Quinn, a nubile Christian girl who wants to spread her faith on the Dark Continent. Confined to a remote UN base where humanitarian aid is distributed, they quickly submit themselves to the "reality" of their new home: The weather sucks, every man has his price, and the people who are your friends today could be locking a missile on you tomorrow. As the book progresses, we start to wonder about the mental health of these would-be protagonists: sporadic flashbacks reveal them as people who are all either running from someone or looking for something, and we can only shake our heads in dismay as they realize the situations they find themselves in are far worse then the ones they left behind. As mentioned by several reviewers, dialogue is the Achilles heel of Caputo's game; it too often comes across as stilted, hackneyed, and melodramatic, especially the locker room talk of Wesley and the scenes with the African "big man" Adid. But man, the detail! Caputo clearly did his homework on the Sudan: he writes it as a land of sun and sand and snakes, a hard country that produces hard people. I also like how the ending avoids traditional feel-good cop-outs: The people with the most to lose, lose, the "bad guys" get away scot-free, and nobody comes to rescue Quinn when her heaven slowly descends into hell. In the end Caputo raises far more questions then he answers, which is the mark of either a very good author or a very bad one. Maybe if Douglas sported horns and scales we would be more inclined to vilify him? Is that the point? Despite the leisurely pace and frequent slow spots, I feel Acts of Faith was worth my time.
Summary: Didn't Expect To But Loved It
Rating: 4
I am cleaning out my bookshelf and came across this novel. I don't know why I bought it when I did as it doesn't generally fit into my preferred genres. However, I ended up loving it. It was very engrossing, an epic story about a place completely foreign. I can't remember if it was difficult to get into but I know I finished it and so it couldn't have been that hard. It is a great midweight vacation read.
Summary: The best novel I've read in years
Rating: 5
"Do you suppose war to be here what wars are elsewhere?"... "Do you suppose that it is an event, with a discrete beginning that will proceed to a discrete middle und so weiter on to a discrete end? No! It is a condition of life, like drought. There is war in Sudan because there is war." "Like Vietnam?" Douglas murmured. "We're here because we're here because we're here." Manfred's gaze passed from the American's face to his boots, then back up again. "I have no idea what you are talking about." ___ Acts of Faith is an odyssey in a way that meets the origin of the word: a story of how the lives of individuals are changed through the fantastic, horrific environments of war, and how this novel's characters in particular emerge out the other side almost completely unrecognizable from how, and as whom, they began. The author reinforces at every point that measuring the story of Africa - and in particular Sudan - upon the American scale of good and evil is a disservice to the people and the bargains they have arranged with this continent that seems also to be a god. It may in fact be a kind of irreligious sin to view Sudan as measurable in any sense of logic: Nothing goes unpunished. Tolls are extracted everywhere. There are beautiful passages that you want to commit to memory (in particular the pages that describe the cultural characteristics of Americans) and other scenes when the cruelties of the natural and manmade worlds seem inseparable, if they're not, in fact, the very same thing. Acts of Faith is an amazing novel with unforgettable characters. I wasn't sure I'd be able to get through it, but I'm glad I did.
Summary: Longer than it should be
Rating: 3
I really expected to love this novel, and didn't. You have to slog through the first 100 pages to get interested in the story, and then it plays out waaaay too long. The characters were good and well-developed, though somewhat cliche, but the ending was predictable for the last 200 pages of the book. The subject matter is interesting and compelling and timely, and much of the writing is finely crafted without falling into the "Mommy, watch me write!" mode. All in all, I found much of the story to be a more-challenging version of Cause Celeb by Helen Fielding (the Bridget Jones' Diary author).
Summary: Pulitzer Fizzle
Rating: 2
Caputo writes a good novel, but it isn't literature. That's about it. How and why a book like this would even be nominated for a literary prize tells us a great deal about the state of literature in this country. Somehow the people selected for the selection committee have no idea what literature is and cannot separate it from front page news. "Acts of Faith" is barely competent in execution, but it is rich in local fact and fiction, with references to the great literary colony of the 1920s in Kenya, world oil exploration, anthropological commentary on the tribes of Africa, and many insights into multicultural conflict. The novel belongs firmly to that genre established in the 1960s by Capote and Mailer that seeks to retell the news without being held to journalistic standards of veracity. Caputo writes well enough, perhaps even better than most, but it is a "thick" prose, lacking in a literary style distinct from its claims to realism. It is probably worth the read because it takes one places one might find of interest. The setting is everything: Somalia, the Sudan, Kenya, and other places at the fringe of the grand American Empire. Had it been nominated for a prize in journalism, I might have voted for it myself.
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