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The Cleveland Plain Dealer
2006-12-04
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"...strains of joy and rage and revelation. Greene has a gift for making her reader see what society keeps on the periphery, and for clamping our attention to the page."
And
"Readers who liked "Mountains Beyond Mountains" will find Greene is a stronger storyteller than Tracy Kidder. Both struggle with the mystery of goodness, but Greene's protagonist is not a saintly American doctor. Teferra is a flawed, feisty, unforgettable character of the (un)developing world."
One of my favorite readers said that she plans to skip Melissa Fay Greene's new book, despite having loved this author, especially for her 1991 nonfiction tour de force, "Praying for Sheetrock."
The latest work, "There is No Me Without You," follows the morally complex story of Haregewoin Teferra, a middle-class Ethiopian woman who began taking in AIDS orphans when the pandemic was still unexplained and whispered about as "slim."
"It just seems too sad," my friend said.
Certainly sadness is a strain in this book. But there are also strains of joy and rage and revelation. Greene has a gift for making her reader see what society keeps on the periphery, and for clamping our attention to the page. I found myself trading sleep to fly along her readable chapters.
The title comes from the lyrics of an Ethiopian pop song. Teferra typed it on a white slip of paper and slipped it alongside pictures of her older daughter, Atetegeb, whom she nursed fiercely through a long, strange illness. At the end, Greene writes:
"Haregewoin collected the random sticks and thorns of her daughter's limp body to her, gathered the bedspread around her to swaddle her, and rocked her gently, weeping a small lullaby. It was like trying to keep an ember lit on a windy mountaintop, all the forces of nature arrayed against her. 'Atetegeb,' she whispered. But the joints came unhinged, the string of the muscles went slack, and the tiny flame of life was blown out."
For a very long time, Teferra was lost in her grief. But a Catholic church asked her to shelter two street children - teens with whom she did not, in the end, do particularly well. But a healing had begun.
By page 176, some 30 children are crowded into Teferra's compound, crammed alongside Teferra's prayers for food. By page 218, "the nice neighborhood lady" of Addis Ababa is sheltering 42 children, slowly going deaf to their cries.
When a representative from a European adoption agency - the first of many - arrives, she and Teferra mull placing one of the infants with a childless couple in Malta. Consider what Greene sees in a single, compact sentence:
The complicated, incriminating story of northern hemisphere wealth and southern hemisphere desperation boiled down to this: a sunny morning on the Horn of Africa, a hot, untidy bedroom, and two short graying widows (a little achy, a little too old, a little discombobulated for this) in charge of a quilt of squirming motherless babies."
Greene's book is important because she swings skillfully from the microstory in Teferra's compound to the global story of AIDS, tucking in a lucid skim of Ethiopian history and plenty of data from the "speakathons" of international AIDS conferences.
One snippet: Thanks to American access to antiretroviral drugs, the United States saw just 59 new cases of pediatric AIDS in 2003. Ethiopia, strangled by an inability to afford prenatal treatment for pregnant, HIV-positive women, saw more than 60,000 new cases.
Greene blisters pharmaceutical corporations and their friends in the U.S. government for what she lays out as a track record of greed. She recounts how AIDS treatments came to fruition largely in public laboratories, with public dollars, yet private companies sewed up exclusive, commercial patents that bring in returns that rival oil profits.
The author contrasts this state of affairs with the public-mindedness of Jonas Salk, who discovered the polio vaccine. Asked why he never patented his breakthrough, Salk replied, "There is no patent. How could you patent the sun?"
Readers who liked "Mountains Beyond Mountains" will find Greene is a stronger storyteller than Tracy Kidder. Both struggle with the mystery of goodness, but Greene's protagonist is not a saintly American doctor. Teferra is a flawed, feisty, unforgettable character of the (un)developing world.
"There is No Me Without You" has a few incidental flaws: Greene can belabor a point, and her litany of woeful children can wear a reader out. Yet 37 color photographs allow us to ponder many key people and several heart-pounding vignettes.
The book concludes with a unique adoption, told in an unexpected sequence of remarkable beauty and power. It answers some key questions, and left me gasping. My hope is that my friend - and the many like her - will not miss it.
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