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Jul 5, 2009

"Life's most urgent question is: What are you doing for others?" --Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

Trickle-down Eggersnomics

Halfway through our interview, Dave Eggers jumps up from the sofa, flips open his laptop, which is buried under a pile of magazines and newspapers, and retrieves an email from Valentino Achak Deng, the Sudanese refugee whose harrowing experiences during his country's civil war and bizarre entry into the U.S. were chronicled by Eggers in What Is the What. The proceeds from that book, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in 2006, go to Deng's foundation, which is helping reconstruct Sudan. The email contains photos showing what has been done so far with the money: pictures of a recently opened school building in Marial Bai, Deng's native village. "Isn't it beautiful?" Eggers says. Call it "trickle-down eggersnomics" -- ever since his immensely successful 2000 debut, A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, Eggers has used his royalties to help others.