Books: Queen of Katwe

In the grand scheme of things, the temporary sacrifices Americans are being asked to make due to COVID-19 are pretty minor: getting takeout instead of dining in, watching Netflix instead of going out on the town, seeing Grandma over FaceTime instead of visiting. Anyone who thinks the country's current semi-quarantine is at all a hardship should read, "Queen of Katwe," an extraordinary story about an unlikely chess champion.

The book is nominally about Phiona Mutesi, a young Ugandan chess prodigy who becomes a Woman Candidate Master, but it's really about the people living in the Katwe slum, one of the poorest parts of one of the poorest countries in the world. The conditions in Katwe are almost unimaginable - no electricity, no running water, starving on streets filthy with raw sewage. Yet Phiona, her coach, her mother, and the many other hardscrabble folks the book describes fight through each day nonetheless. If they can continue on in a country where 20,000 people die of AIDS each year, having enough toilet paper seems like a small worry.