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A review by cameronkobesauthor
Correr para vivir by Lopez Lomong
3.0
Lopepe Lomong has a positive and inspirational story here, and I wouldn't want to diminish that. He had a great opportunity in his escape from war-torn Sudan and he had great accomplishments in becoming an Olympic athlete.
But, it seemed to me like there was one major gap in his story, and the presence of that gap could have been a result of his own choices in the writing or it could have been a result of the publisher. The Thomas Nelson Publishing Firm is an explicitly Christian publisher (which I did not know when I checked out this book) so I feel safe inferring that they don't publish a lot of works with the potential for controversy.
This is what I mean about a gap. Lomong came to the United States as a teenage refugee. As he tells it, just about everyone he met in the United States welcomed him and provided for him, and America was just the greatest place in the world to be, and when the 9/11 attacks happened he saw all Americans come together in unity and he saw George W. Bush (who he later was proud to meet in person) as a wonderful inspiring leader. Doesn't anybody else see anything off in that narrative?
The period immediately after 9/11 might have been a time for a lot of Americans to come together, but it was also a time of intense fear and paranoia and xenophobia. Foreigners and refugees were severely targeted by a whole lot of Americans whose ideas of nationalism involved retaliating against the "other". This is a level of prejudice that also lands on top of the widespread prejudice faced by ethnic minorities in the United States. There is not one hint of that in this book. The closest allusion to it could be seen in the mention that after 9/11 there were restrictions on how many refugees were allowed into the country so some of Lomong's friends in Kenya could not come right away.
I know I'm making an assumption here, but it seems pretty likely to me that Lopepe Lomong did experience some of that prejudice, and it has been omitted from this book for the sake of creating a more unabashedly inspirational story.
That just seems slightly suspect to me. I think a more honest narrative would have made this book better.
But, it seemed to me like there was one major gap in his story, and the presence of that gap could have been a result of his own choices in the writing or it could have been a result of the publisher. The Thomas Nelson Publishing Firm is an explicitly Christian publisher (which I did not know when I checked out this book) so I feel safe inferring that they don't publish a lot of works with the potential for controversy.
This is what I mean about a gap. Lomong came to the United States as a teenage refugee. As he tells it, just about everyone he met in the United States welcomed him and provided for him, and America was just the greatest place in the world to be, and when the 9/11 attacks happened he saw all Americans come together in unity and he saw George W. Bush (who he later was proud to meet in person) as a wonderful inspiring leader. Doesn't anybody else see anything off in that narrative?
The period immediately after 9/11 might have been a time for a lot of Americans to come together, but it was also a time of intense fear and paranoia and xenophobia. Foreigners and refugees were severely targeted by a whole lot of Americans whose ideas of nationalism involved retaliating against the "other". This is a level of prejudice that also lands on top of the widespread prejudice faced by ethnic minorities in the United States. There is not one hint of that in this book. The closest allusion to it could be seen in the mention that after 9/11 there were restrictions on how many refugees were allowed into the country so some of Lomong's friends in Kenya could not come right away.
I know I'm making an assumption here, but it seems pretty likely to me that Lopepe Lomong did experience some of that prejudice, and it has been omitted from this book for the sake of creating a more unabashedly inspirational story.
That just seems slightly suspect to me. I think a more honest narrative would have made this book better.