It was good and sad, but Angelina Jolie doesn't really have the writing skills to make it powerful. ( )

This book is a personal chronicle of Angelina Jolie's initial trips to visit refugees around the world from 2001 to 2002. It is a fantastically easy and honest introduction to the refugee situations in Sierra Leone, Tanzania, Cambodia, Pakistan, and Ecuador. I say "honest" mostly because the book reads as the title implies it should be: this is a journal, with several hour conversations passing from one sentence to the next, with reactions, emotions, and passing observations and speculations tossed out in short sentences. Especially at the beginning, many of her reactions, I think, are just how the average American would react: shock, anger, pity, surprise, respect. The book also provides a healthy balance of raw numbers (millions of refugees, millions of children dying, etc.) and personal stories of survivors. The section on Afghan refugees in Pakistan was especially interesting from a historical perspective, given that it was written in August 2001. ( )

This book surprised me. It's obviously meant to be exactly as the title suggests: Notes--there's very little in depth information or discussion of specific situations, though there is enough here to give you a base of background and larger conflicts/situations. As someone who's been reading quite a bit about relief work in the last year, I expected to move through this book quickly. I thought the lack of in depth explanation and personal detail (of those she talked to) would make this somewhat easier to take than some of the other memoir type books I"ve been reading. Simply, I was apparently wrong. About half-way through, I realized that each time I sat down with the book, I was reading fewer and fewer pages. It turns out, the lack of detail means that she covers SO many people, the scope of the situations comes across even more clearly than if she were to bombard us with statistics and names. Moving from paragraph to paragraph with new people and places in each ended up being very affecting for this reader. I'm not sure how much this would have been affected by my previous reading. I think that this book could be read and understood, as well as worthwhile, for readers who don't have the same knowledge I do--but I'm not positive. I will say, though, that one of the most interesting sections here was the journal from Ecuador dealing with Columbians; this was the area I was least familiar with going into the book.

In general, I recommend this as a relatively easy read for what it is--the material is far from easy to take, but it is not overly or needlessly graphic, and the journal-type layout makes the book move quickly, at least at first. As I said before though, the farther I got into it, the less I could take in one sitting. Jolie does work at focusing on the positive though, as much as the negative, where she can find it, and this was refreshing, though it may have made the book harder to take simply by the attention to the simple pleasures which are, essentially, the only positives. Regardless, I do recommend it for someone interested in a layman's look into contemporary refugee situations. ( )

I found it a very touching and compelling book. It is about Angelina Jolie's role as a Goodwill Ambassador for the UN High Commissioner for Refugees and her travels to places like Sierra Leone and Cambodia. If you are interested in Ms. Jolie's humanitarian work or finding out more about the refugees of the world then I think you will appreciate this book. ( )

This book flew underneath the book radar. It is so worth the purchase. Angelina's tale will move you to read beyond the local going on's in the newspaper ( )