Refuge: A True Story of Faith and Civil War
John & Bessie Gonleh with Bruce Beakley
WinePress, 288 pp., $14.95, www.tbbmedia.com
John Gonleh, a Liberian Baptist minister, and his wife Bessie recount the incredible hardships and miracles their family has witnessed since civil war forced them to flee their home in 1990. Their friend Bruce Beakley does well in helping them organize and communicate their story accurately—and with telling details without reducing it to journalistic reportage or trying to render it a literary event.
Refuge reads like a dinner conversation—one so arresting that everyone forgets to eat. John and Bessie take turns narrating, occasionally describing the same event from different points of view. They share accounts of torture, personal fears and extramarital affairs honestly without being graphic, and by the end of the evening (or book, rather) you have become intimates.
The Gonlehs’ story sheds light not only on an area of the world that remains dark on many radar screens, but also on the refugee experience in general and the struggles still coming against a new segment of American society.
