I’ve heard more than once Tracy Kidder’s famous book on Dr. Paul Farmer, Mountains Beyond Mountains, emphatically described as “life-changing,” so I had high expectations for the Pulitzer Prize-winning author’s latest work, Strength in What Remains, which tells the story of a survivor of the early 1990s genocide between Hutus and Tutsis in Rwanda and Burundi.

Kidder divides his book into two main parts. In the first, called “Flights,” he recounts the life story of his protagonist, Deogratias (Deo), a Burundian medical student who fled his country for the United States in 1994. Kidder constructs Deo’s story by switching most chapters between his life in Burundi, and his life in New York City after his escape.

Kidder recounts Deo’s childhood growing up in a family of cow farmers in a village called Butanza. He makes the deliberate choice to hold off on revealing Deo’s identity as a Tutsi until nearly 40 pages into the book, establishing one of the book’s major themes, equality, early on. Often weaving Kirundi words into his prose, Kidder richly describes Deo’s country and his relationships with his family members.

After succeeding academically in middle and high school, Deo went on to attend medical school until tensions between Hutus and Tutsis seriously escalated after the assassination of the country’s then-President Melchior Ndadaye. —a Hutu. In this part of the book, Kidder gives historical and political background on the complex Hutu and Tutsi conflict along with his description of Deo’s experience of it. He effectively balances his passages on Deo’s dangerous journey throughout Burundi with his more informative sections. Kidder’s tonal contrast works to bring forth the deep passions within Deo’s journey.

In New York City, Deo struggled at first working as a delivery man for the grocery store, Gristedes, during the day and sleeping in Central Park at night. After meeting a SoHo couple, Charlie and Nancy Wolf, Deo completed an undergraduate degree at Columbia University. He later went on to the Harvard School of Public Health, where he met Farmer and began to work with his Partners In Health organization.

In the second part of the book, Kidder recounts his own experience interviewing Deo, and traveling with him back to post civil war Burundi in 2006. He also describes Deo’s efforts to build medical clinics in his home country. Kidder names the part “Gusimbura,” after a word in Kurundi. As Deo says to him in the introduction to the book, “Because people don’t talk about people who died. By their names, anyways. They call it gusimbura.”

In contrast to “Flights,” Kidder writes “Gusimbura” with a high level of self consciousness, often explaining his own emotions, which ultimately pulls his reader away from Deo and his experience. At some points in this part, I found Kidder’s language strangely omniscient: In one instant Kidder writes, “A young man arrives in the big city with $200 in his pocket, no English at all, and memories of horror so fresh that he sometimes confuses past and present.”

Kidder, however, is a skilled writer, but strongest when closely describing people or settings. In the beginning of the book, he writes with a tender simplicity about Deo and his grandfather, Lonjino: “There were many times with his grandfather in the mountain pastures when Deo felt in no hurry to become someone else. Times when the cows would take a break from grazing and lie down, and Lonjino would sit and play his flute.” Kidder also confronts Deo’s immediate experience of gruesome events during the genocide with honesty. In one of the books most powerful passages, Kidder describes a scene from Deo’s journey to the Rwandan border: “Just a little distance away, the figure of a woman was slumped against another bunch of banana trees. There was dried blood on her face. She must have collapsed there and died, but the baby was alive. It was in her lap, its little hands groping at its mother’s bared breast. And it was looking right at Deo.”

I found, however, that beautiful and powerful passages do not make up for the fact that Strength in What Remains tries to accomplish too much. Kidder attempts to tell Deo’s story, tell his own experience of Deo’s story, and then also tell the story of the complex Hutu and Tutsi conflict. To make his book as powerful as possible, Kidder should have focused most of his energy on telling Deo’s story from Deo’s perspective. In the end, I was disappointed to find that Kidder’s more self-focused “Gusimbura” part detracted from the raw power and emotion within Deo’s story.