I’ve got my top summer reading suggestion ready for you. In fact, I’m recommending you purchase two copies of the book, Nicholas Kristof’s Chasing Hope: A Reporter’s Life. There are two the reason why.
I’ll get to the second eventually. But the primary is more straightforward: This is a memoir from someone who has led some of the dramatically interesting lives of the last half-century, as an acclaimed foreign correspondent and columnist for The New York Times.
If you make an inventory of the world’s most shattering and consequential conflicts, catastrophes, and convulsions over the past 40 years, the chances are very high that Kristof was present to witness them. So too are the chances that somebody was threatening to shoot him: warlords smuggling conflict diamonds within the Congo, Sudanese soldiers roaming the deserts amid the Darfur genocide, Egyptian security gangs wielding straight razors in Tahrir Square, Israeli soldiers patrolling the dark streets of Beirut, ragged teenagers marauding with AK-47s in West Africa, or nervous American soldiers attempting to contain an Iraqi mob robbing a bank in Basra.
There is an excellent longer list of terrifying events where the weapons were being directed at people standing next to Kristof. Such scenes involve Tiananmen Square protestors being massacred by the Chinese army, heroin traffickers in Afghanistan, security forces in collapsing Communist regimes in Eastern Europe, or rioting mobs parading heads on pikes in Indonesia.
The book’s narrative can be implausible as a movie script, but it surely’s irresistible as personal storytelling because there is no such thing as a hint of bravado, attention searching for, or adrenaline addiction. We simply find ourselves following a really sincere human who, over a lifetime, keeps taking small steps to go see what is going on to other humans who’re suffering unspeakable brutality within the hidden corners of our world.
As he goes, he finds himself sharing the unseen terror borne by hundreds of thousands of abnormal people when history’s great catastrophes unfold. And once amongst them, Kristof becomes the steward of their stories. When, for example, a weeping rickshaw driver desperately pedals his cart through a hail of bullets in Tiananmen Square, attempting to get the motionless body of a bloodied protester to safety, he gives Kristof his commission with a shout: “Tell the world! Tell the world!”
In this case, Kristof (and his journalist wife, Sheryl WuDunn) fulfilled that sacred commission well enough to earn a Pulitzer Prize for his or her coverage. But such accolades are complicated, as Kristof seems to know: “We were feted as heroes while our Chinese friends who had contributed a lot to our reporting were jailed or in hiding or worse.”
Comparing notes on catastrophe
This is just not only a book about an exceedingly interesting and thoughtful life. It also poses interesting questions. How ought humans to live with eyes wide open in a fallen world of a lot suffering, violence, injustice, and death—yet a lot courage, love, undeniable beauty, and pulsating life?
This is why I like to recommend buying two copies—and with a particular suggestion. Treat yourself to at least one, and share one other with a member of the family or friend of an older or younger generation. Read it together and compare notes.
For baby boomers, Gen Xers, and millennials, the narrative will take you back through certain seismic and shattering moments of world history. This is useful, since it’s strangely easy to lose sight of generational trials you’ve already weathered when you find yourself continually assaulted with the screaming ferocity of today’s apocalypse economy—the outrage industry that demands your obsessive attention to each terrible thing that is unquestionably ending the world.
Chasing Hope helps us see the elevated, longer arc of human events. From this vantage point, you may see the harrowing climbs and treacherous passages through which you and the world have already passed. It doesn’t make current challenges go away, but chances are you’ll find it puts them in a less catastrophizing, more steadying, even encouraging perspective.
The truth is, there may be little that transpires in a given 12 months—let alone in a given 24-hour news cycle—that has the importance, gravity, or peril of 100 things that shook the world over the past half-century. For example, exactly 30 years ago, the Rwandan genocide unleashed an orgy of murder that saw 800,000 innocent men, women, and kids brutally hacked to death inside a couple of short weeks. Nothing happening now or throughout the last 10 years—nothing—comes near the speed and scale with which the genocide inflicted terror, death, and tragedy.
At the time, I used to be a 31-year-old prosecutor on the US Department of Justice. The UN sent me to Rwanda to direct its genocide investigation immediately after the war. That experience modified my perspective on every part that has happened on the planet since. It doesn’t lead me to attenuate or disengage from the tragedies of today. In fact, I’ve spent many of the last 30 years with my colleagues on the International Justice Mission immersed in today’s heartbreaking struggles to beat slavery, violence against women and kids, and police abuse.
But after I consider the longer arc of the human story, I find I can do that work with an elevated perspective. Much like Kristof in Chasing Hope, I’m actually more encouraged and optimistic than ever.
For Gen Z readers, Kristof’s memoir offers you an intimate and authentic primer on the nice train of worldwide events that profoundly shaped and traumatized the world you inherited. You could seek the advice of Google and get a fast, metallic-tasting AI blurb on each event as you hear it mentioned in disjointed conversations over the approaching years. Or you could possibly treat yourself to a deeply human and coherent chronicle of up to date history through the compassionate, questioning, loving eyes of a farm kid from Oregon who tried to honor the spirit of the world’s most vulnerable people—including Kristof’s refugee father—by telling a few of the hardest stories of his day.
I feel you’ll find that Kristof’s larger story offers an orienting frame and inspiration for coping with the rushing scroll of tragedy shorts and screaming trend lines that surround our brains and send the partitions of panic closing in. Grant yourself a book-length summer sabbatical from the culture’s newsfeed neurosis and let Kristof’s history transport you to a better frame of reference.
And then discuss it along with your book-club buddy from one other generation. What was it wish to be alive through these catastrophic and chaotic global events? Who saw things more clearly and properly on the time, and why? What should good people have done? What should good people do now?
Christ’s heart for the world
These are especially urgent questions for people of Christian faith, who profess to know what Jesus would teach about living in a fallen and violent yet beautiful and worthy world. A world that, in line with this same Jesus, he’s relentlessly at work redeeming through his grace and through those that follow him.
Although I don’t know if Kristof is a believer, he seems thoroughly Jesus-curious—or, as my kids would say of so many friends, “Christian adjoining.” Kristof writes with a rare appreciation for the earnest, unnamed Christians who’re serving, healing, and loving in essentially the most Christlike ways in the toughest places.
In Chasing Hope, lots of his most exemplary heroes appear to be following Jesus. Some are famous, like Archbishop Desmond Tutu and Jimmy Carter. But most you’ve likely never heard of: Dr. Catherine Hamlin in Ethiopia, Dr. Tom Catena within the Sudan, Sister Rachel Fassera in Uganda, Dr. Denis Mukwege within the Congo, or the great people of the First Presbyterian Church of Portland, who sponsored his refugee father within the Nineteen Forties and made Kristof’s story possible.
For years, Kristof has written a New York Times Christmas column with earnest questions for Christian leaders about Jesus, the Bible, and the behavior of Christian people. As he has come to understand IJM’s Christian community all over the world and their work addressing slavery and violence among the many vulnerable poor, he has asked me similar questions over time—especially about evangelical Christians in America.
For many years, IJM has been inviting American Christians to get better the biblical teaching about God’s love for the world and Christ’s passion for justice. Indeed, over 27 years, a generation of American Christians has helped power an IJM movement that has brought freedom and healing to a whole lot of 1000’s of people that were enslaved, imprisoned, beaten, raped, and robbed on the planet’s poorest communities. It can be a shame for American Christians to lose Christ’s heart for the world and for the vulnerable, leaving their preoccupations more inward, tribal, resentful, political, and fearful.
The Christian faith teaches that every body on the planet—of each nation, tribe, and tongue—is of infinite and equal value. Jesus taught that if individuals are hurting and in need, the relevant query is just not Are they my neighbor? but Will I show mercy and love? Will I treat them as I might wish to be treated if I were enslaved, imprisoned, beaten, raped, or robbed?
This is what makes Kristof’s life story such a welcome provocation for Christians young and old. In his writing and reporting, he seems to act as if Christ’s teachings in regards to the world and its individuals are true, though he may not share Christian beliefs about his divinity and the dominion of God. What, then, should we make of those that do profess these beliefs but don’t act as if they’re true?
More provocatively, what in the event that they brought their beliefs and actions into greater harmony, radiating authenticity, courage, humility, and joy? Over a generation, I (like Kristof) have witnessed that such lives of Christlike beauty are, indeed, possible. And all over the world, I see a latest generation of on a regular basis saints quietly doing justice, loving mercy, and walking humbly with their God.
As I write this, I’m in South Asia, coming from a profound day with two young women of religion (one from Nebraska and one from Bangladesh) who’re partnering with IJM colleagues and native authorities to bring healing to women and girls ravaged by sexual violence. Like Kristof, they’re chasing hope—and finding it. And by their lives, they testify not only that the teachings of Jesus are true, but that he himself is true.
Gary Haugen is the founder and CEO of International Justice Mission. His books include Good News About Injustice: A Witness of Courage in a Hurting World.
