Stringer : : a Reporter's Journey in the Congo

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Stringer submitted by William Foreman on December 30, 2014, 1:02pm "Stringer" is a non-fiction book about a young mathematician at Yale who decides not to pursue a career in academia and instead heads to Congo to work as a foreign correspondent. He ends up freelancing for the AP as he spurns the expat life and lives with a struggling Congolese family - a la Ryszard Kapuscinski, the Polish master of literary reportage who famously roughed it on his assignments. Sundaram paints a marvelously descriptive picture of Congo. He must have been writing a few thousand words in his journal each day, and I don't know where he found the time and energy while working in such a chaotic, dysfunctional place. But in the end there's too much description, and his fever-dream style of storytelling wore on me. He fails to provide a big-picture view of the place. One of his biggest spot stories was the Kabila-Bemba election in 2006, and I learned more about the vote from Wikipedia. I was curious about what he would say about the AP, and my former colleagues will be amused by his claim that he was the victim of "power politics" when the company sent in some seasoned correspondents to help him cover the 2006 election. But Sundaram does do a good job hammering home some of the most important takeaways: There are too many places in the world that are strategically important - or just plain interesting - but get far too little coverage. And those who are trying to tell the story are lucky if they're getting paid a living wage.