In “Harrowing December,” Prof. Momoh Sekou Dudu’s recently published memoir, he descriptively tells a personal survival story that is super-charged with countless life’s lessons. The author walks the reader through his life from his boyhood in Gordorlahun, his ancestral village in Lofa County, northern Liberia, to his present time in Midwestern North America. He recounts his childhood memories of the society he was born into. Right from the get-go, I recognized some of the book’s strong attributes: clear organization, use of appropriate language, depth of discussion of the main subject, and the skillful use of a first-person narrator.
This work, in fact, could be considered Prof. Dudu’s magnum opus for the inimitable ability he exhibited in descriptively narrating his story in a fashion that does not let go of its grip on the reader; it seizes your attention, keeps you glued to the story, and renders you powerless when you contemplate taking a breather. The end of a chapter does not let you off the mesmerizing train either; it creates in you, instead, an unyielding hunger to read on. And on you surely will go—one chapter after the other.