rabck from squeakychu; A white journalist based in Zimbabwe doing stories around africa and his black wife become aware of the overwhelming volume of abandoned children, most because their parents are suffering from AIDS, and the children die usually within 3 years. Despite this, they take Chipo home for the weekend, which ends in a hospitalization and then years of paperwork trying to adopt her, which is heavily frowned on by the government. Also includes passages about Neely's growing up years in Mississippi, but interestingly doesn't include much about the wife Vita. ( )

DATELINE: Zimbabwe—a sunlit afternoon in the dry season—winter 1998. A newborn lies hidden in chest-high grass beneath an acacia tree, birth fluids and blood still streaking her skin. Ants feast on her right ear. Improbably, impossibly, a woman passing on a nearby road hears her thin cry and brings help.
DATELINE: Detroit—a stifling summer night almost a decade earlier. A city-bred black woman raised on Motown sits sleepless at her window. Her neighbor, a restless white reporter from the Deep South, with a penchant for motorcycles and a predilection for club dancing, invites her to his balcony for a glass of wine. An unlikely friendship blooms.
DATELINE: Harare, Zimbabwe—winter 1998. The reporter, Neely Tucker, and his wife Vita, newly settled into their foreign posting, volunteer at orphanages flooded with children of parents dead from AIDS. Mr. Tucker picks up a tiny infant with long eyelashes and a serious expression, and whispers. The infant wraps her hand around his little finger. The reporter is surprised, even shocked to find the detachment he cultivated while reporting in war-torn, sorrow-filled places crumbling into feeling.
So begins Love in the Driest Season, Neely Tucker’s chronicle of adopting his daughter Chipo. Mr. Tucker’s narrative brings an impeccably evoked immediacy to an excruciatingly slow process.
This is a chronicle of day-long waits in hallways for a word with a social worker, of repeated requests for licenses, testimonials, birth certificates, visas, police reports, fingerprints, hospital records; of unanswered phone calls, of digging through wall-high stacks of paperwork to locate lost files, of nerve-racking home visits, of urgent drives to renew 2-week emergency placement orders.
Yet bureacracy is in some sense only the geography in which the story of Neely, Vita and Chipo plays out.
For this is a tale of tragedy and illness: Despite heroic efforts by Stella Mesikano, the director of the Children’s Home, 16 infants and toddlers under her care die over 7 months. In a nation of 11 million people, 500 Zimbabweans die each week of AIDS.
It’s a tale of racism redefined: When Tucker pushes a stroller along the streets of Harare, he elicits stares, looks and questions: “What’s that white man doing with that little black baby.”
It’s a tale of a career rethought. We are taken on assignment with Tucker to the world’s most violent places: the Embassy bombings in Kenya, the rebellions in the Democratic Republic of Congo, the oil field fires killing a thousand Nigerians, the skulls stacked in churches in Rwanda. Too much experience with devastation leads Tucker to examine his survival strategies: “You can just keep going for so many years, not allowing yourself to feel anything, until you arrive at a place where your emotional connections have gone dark, lights out, all blown fuses that don’t work anymore,” Tucker says. This book chronicles his struggle to replace the fuses.
And finally it’s a tale of a tiny hope spreading. A baby on the verge of dying thrives. Someone is saved. The name Chipo translates as “Gift.” As his daughter becomes the gift of Tucker’s life, so Love in the Driest Season becomes his gift to us. [I presented this review at The New York Public Library's Books To Remember presentation, March 2005.] ( )

This is such a compelling story that paucity of dialogue wasn't such a detractant, although I noticed it throughout. The story is told by a journalist, thus it reads more like the account that it is instead of a fictional story. And it's a powerful story indeed. The reader feels frustration and numbing realities along with the author. I loved this story. It's well worth the read; I listened to it on CD. The reader learns along the way, always a good thing. And the realities in Africa are chilling. This is a historical snapshot in time as well as a family memoir. I have deep respect and admiration for the author and his wife after reading this account.

Books like this one bring us greater understanding of the world than we'll ever find in the nightly news in America or in newspapers. Stories like this one bring situations to a personal level, something we tend to forget that every situation really is. We need more stories like this, though the dangers to those who report them are overwhelming. Thanks to all brave enough to bring us stories of stark reality, and those brave enough to make a difference in even one life. ( )

One can't help but admire the author's heartfelt desire to help a Zimbabwean orphan baby. But Tucker doesn't bother to explore or understand the political and historical background of his daughter's birth country. He is naturally frustrated by the poverty and corruption he witnesses, but can't understand why the black Africans he meets aren't universally thrilled that a white American is adopting one of "their" children. I wish this family all the best, but I wouldn't recommend the book. ( )

A true story about a white American journalist and his black american wife who try to adopt a Zimbabwian girl when they move to Zimbabwe. Very interesting. Also the first hand accounts of Zimbabwe and the land's dislike of Americans, the land's Aids crisis and the economic and political plummet. ( )