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Title: An Act of Faith to Finish This Book
Review: When I read the glowing reviews of "Acts of Faith" by Phillip Caputo, I was encouraged. As someone who has lived and worked in Ethiopia and knows something about Sudan, I thought this was our answer to Joseph Conrad. Unfortunately, this is not the case. Mr. Caputo knows what he is talking about. He understands the region and feels the tragedy with compassion. But he is not a novelist. Like Peter Matthiessen, his writing is better suited to other genres. For Matthiessen, it is nature writing. For Caputo, it is journalism. I found this book hard going, with much of the dialogue too painful to even read, it was so amateurish. The characters are strictly cardbord. A really good editor might have saved "Acts of Faith," but Caputo had no such luck. Instead, he gives us bad Hemingway and Conrad. If you want to read a great novel about the tragedy of post-colonial Africa, go back to "A Bend in the River."
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