Benaron, Naomi. Running the Rift. HarperCollins Toronto, 2012. F;05/12

This is another book I loved in spite of irrational worries engendered by the book jacket that the author was going to be a self-inflating bore. She’s a scientist (an Earth scientist), a triathlete, a championship do-gooder, and a prize-winning author. And the story is set in Africa and involves genocide. Recipe for a thinly-disguised ego trip.

But for all that she serves up an honestly gripping sports story entangled with political intrigue and the realistically-rendered slow tumbling of a society into hideous nastiness. The style gets precious but it’s forgivable because that only happens at times when we feel real emotion on behalf of the little-bit larger-than-life credible characters.

There were a couple of very well-chosen quotes, one from Ecclesiastes (9:10) that I took to heart (I prefer the King James raised as I was in the 1950s):

Whatsoever thy hand findeth to do, do it with thy might; for there is no work, nor device, nor knowledge, nor wisdom, in the grave, whither thou goest.

I guess there really are people who unabashedly and unselfconsciously go for the gusto at multiple difficult things, and succeed. At very least Naomi Benaron is good enough to fool me. 8.9