Second-Look Book Reviews - #1

New books often don’t have long shelf lives at bookstores. Also, after just a few weeks in print, the books’ chances of getting featured in a newspaper or magazine review have all but vanished. Newer books already are flooding in and competing for editors’ attentions and shrinking column spaces.

Here are a few books that have been in print for several months and already have had their brief moments in the media sun. Yet they remain very much worthy of second looks by readers.

More “Second-Look Book Reviews” will appear occasionally in future updates of Dateline: Oblivion.

From Bloodshed to Hope in Burundi
By Ambassador Robert Krueger and Kathleen Tobin Krueger
University of Texas Press, $26.00, 308 pages, hardback

Burundi is one of the world’s poorest countries, squeezed between Rwanda and Tanzania in the mountainous heart of Africa. Like many other countries on that troubled continent, Burundi has a long history of political instability and violence.

In 1994, while neighboring Rwanda was wracked by ethnic killings that claimed more than 800,000 lives, U.S. Ambassador Robert Krueger and his wife, Kathleen Tobin Krueger, were sent by President Bill Clinton to try to help preserve Burundi’s fledgling democratic government and minimize its own outbreaks of ethnic violence.

The Kruegers’ book, which has a foreword by Nobel Prize laureate Desmund Tutu, recounts their efforts to help stabilize Burundi amid surging genocide, tragic indifference by many other nations, and great personal danger to Americans and their families.

Fourteen years later, Burundi has made some progress, but it is still a troubled land where Hutus and Tutsis sometimes engage in revenge killings. In the book, Ambassador Krueger lays out his proposals and hopes for a peaceful Burundi. And he adds this urgent call: “If other countries respond to its need, Burundi can take its place as a full participant in the community of nations that by painful experience have learned to respect the value of every human life.”

Remembering Marisa
By Judd Holt
West Oak Press, $24.95, 292 pages, hardback

Judd Holt’s second novel is at once a warm and troubling story of a respected young woman, a teacher, who carries with her some painful memories of violence, as well as a dark secret she can never reveal to anyone, not even the many people who love her.

After Marisa inexplicably goes missing, her friends, her fiancé, her students, and her family start revealing the ways they know, miss and remember her. In their eyes, she is just about perfect, but not quite. As one character recalls: "She never confided with anyone about her problems. She just wouldn’t ask for anyone’s advice….[h]er folks called all kinds of people trying to find out if they had heard from her. No one had. She just ran off. "

The mystery of Marisa’s disappearance plays out across much of the varied and rugged Texas landscape, from the Permian Basin and Big Bend to the Hill Country, San Antonio and North Texas.

Judd Holt’s previous novel is A Promise to Catie, published by the University of North Texas Press.

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