What is the What by Dave Eggers

From Slate magazine:

Dave Eggers has a new book called What Is The What which is about the lost boys of Sudan.

Quoting from the article:

And after 3,800 of these "lost boys"—the phrase taken from Peter Pan's orphans and widely disliked today by most African refugees—started arriving in the United States in 2000, plucked out of refugee camps in Ethiopia, they brought with them stories of what, precisely, it had been like to be a child caught up in an African civil war.

The reviews at Publishers Weekly and Booklist are starred reviews:

Valentino Achak Deng, real-life hero of this engrossing epic, was a refugee from the Sudanese civil war-the bloodbath before the current Darfur bloodbath-of the 1980s and 90s. In this fictionalized memoir, Eggers (A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius) makes him an icon of globalization. Separated from his family when Arab militia destroy his village, Valentino joins thousands of other "Lost Boys," beset by starvation, thirst and man-eating lions on their march to squalid refugee camps in Ethiopia and Kenya, where Valentino pieces together a new life. He eventually reaches America, but finds his quest for safety, community and fulfillment in many ways even more difficult there than in the camps.

The Red Cross has a web site.

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