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3.5/5

A detailed and vivid account of Samantha Power's journey as a child immigrant, a war correspondent, and a representative of America in the United Nations.

I come out of this book having learned that the government/UN is not an entity, but a building in which individuals come together and engage with complex decisions quite unlikely to be ideal to all. As such, changing the world is not accomplished by one grandeur act, but by doing good in individual events and enacting change in ways within one's reach.

The writing is blunt and very detailed, but I found that the strength of the storytelling waned as the pages went on. There were parts of the book that deeply engaged me, but others were difficult to get through. This inconsistency is my only concern. Aside from that, the content of the book was informative and positively calls for further introspection from the readers.

"We are each the love of someone's life."

I first read snippets of this book at an age too young — when I was still in elementary school, in fact. I was eleven years old and had not come from an English-speaking household, so I neither had the proper language skills nor sufficient life experience to fully grasp the scenes described, much less the meaning behind them. Yet, it was one of the very few books in our house, so I sometimes found myself squinting at the pages, trying to extract meaning from what little words I knew.

Every few years since then, I've read and reread the story from front to back. Each time, it would reveal a secret to me — a message or another I had missed from my last reading. Maybe it is this constant revisiting that made me fall in love with the story much like Max meeting with Alice in several, disparate points in his life. It's a story of a romance doomed from the very beginning. The lust for a life well-lived, a desire one cannot satisfy, a contrast of wealth and poverty and old age and youth and tragedy and love — all these come together to hammer in the message: "we are each the love of someone's life."

For how much can you break the human spirit?

Ernest Hemingway starts by building up the story in a seemingly dry, straight-forward fashion — here, Hemingway starts, introducing the wise fisherman of the story, this is an unlucky old man.

During the first few pages, I found myself at odds with his way of writing. Where was the beautiful prose? It's my very first book from this author. I did not find his words as striking and vivid as I'd expected them to be. However, as the story continued on, I realized that the beauty was contained in the old man's experiences — not confined in the way of its retelling.The resilience, passion, hope, sadness, and suffering that made up the themes of the story were beautifully explored in a fisherman's experience at the sea.

Overall, this book has left me with various emotions to struggle with. I found parallels in the slow tearing of the old man's spirit to my own experiences having been undiagnosed for much of my life for a well-masked neurodevelopmental disorder. The consistent failures from something seemingly innate but unknown had been a source of hopelessness, and this book has thoroughly presented what it's like and elicits the same emotions. It is, in a deranged comforting way, a testament that the human experience is shared in the many variations of our day-to-day lives.

There is much meaning to be gained from this book, and I've no doubt that the story is something that I'll carry with me and revisit every so often.