Need: Stories from Africa

A young development worker gets entangled in the politics of relinquishing his authority to locals when his contract is finished, and sees his two-year project destroyed. A simple-minded black handyman worries himself into committing murder as he tries to find his white master's stolen trousers. A white accountant overrules his black colleague's authority in an unexpectedly dangerous situation, thereby precipitating the disaster they are both trying desperately to avoid. Two Peace Corps volunteers take a sick child from his grandmother and attempt to save his life by treating him, but they fail and must take the child's body back to his village. A white man, sick with malaria, is drawn into helping a colleague's wife report a theft to police, and ends up a victim of the police. The idealism of a young white man, who is newly arrived in a remote village in which he is to live and work, is destroyed when a trusted African friend steals from him. These and other stories take one deep into a lush, hot terrain most of us will never visit--a territory characterized by extremes of wealth and poverty, where brutal behavior has become the norm; a world in which need is so great that society is dehumanized; a place where beauty abounds and food grows abundantly, and yet a place of such privation that the social fabric has come apart and murderous civil war looms on the horizon.

About the Author :
Bill McCauley was born in Oklahoma of Depression-era parents who lived some of the migrant life of the Okies depicted in Steinbeck's "The Grapes of Wrath," settling in California during the war years. After the war, again looking for work, they took their family of three children to Washington, to Oregon, back to Oklahoma, thence to Kansas, and finally to Seattle, there to stay. Bill, their eldest, had a life in all those places. At the University of Washington he earned undergraduate degrees in Geological Oceanography and Scientific and Technical Communication. From his earliest years, he loved the way the language in books discovered new worlds that could be experienced in the mind. He started writing early, but was easily diverted by life. It was only in his middle age that he brought together the experience he'd gained writing all those hundreds of fragments with the discipline to work every day, and developed the writing habit that motivates him now. He lives (and writes every day) in Auburn, Washington.

Review :
"A common thread throughout these tales is need . . . the poverty is unimaginable . . . these are evocative, nuanced, tightly written stories." --Publishers Weekly