The foreign correspondent and fiction writer Philip Caputo’s new novel about aid workers in Africa, “Acts of Faith,” lands in bookstores with all the high-minded weightiness of an airdrop. The book’s settings are almost untouched in recent English-language fiction: the war-torn, famine-racked Sudan of the 1990s and the semipermanent encampments of relief workers clustered in neighboring countries. And Caputo’s theme is an important one: how do-gooders intoxicated by their own mercy can wind up doing anything but. So why does “Acts of Faith” still leave a taste like 900 pounds of U.N.- delivered millet – well-intentioned, good for you and virtually without flavor?
The proper ingredients were here for a gripping morality play straight out of Graham Greene. No fewer than three love affairs complement the main story of Knight Air Services, a startup airline that degenerates by slow degrees from flying aid into Sudan to covertly running guns to Sudanese rebels. Underlying it all is Caputo’s impatience with what he sees as American hubris, with the way idealists can sometimes forgive in themselves the very sanctimony they abhor in their government.
More: sfgate.com
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The times have changed. Jane Bell takes a romantic break and discovers the new Croatia - now a must-see tourist destination
25 June 2005
Time was, the only mention we heard of Croatia was in a news report of the long and bitter war in the former Yugoslavia. But times have changed. And now Croatia is back on the tourist must-see list - and deservedly so.
Leaving the kids at home with Granny, we took a romantic spring break to Istria, the largest peninsula on the Adriatic coast, at the north-west corner of this beautiful country.
And, yes, it really was romantic -