Reviewed by Caroline Cummins

War and persecution drive them here in waves: Cambodians in the 1970s, Russian Jews in the 1980s, Bosnians in the 1990s. By the turn of the millennium, displaced Sudanese, mostly young men, had begun forming yet another American refugee community. Children who had fled their country's long-running civil war, they became known as the "lost boys" of Sudan.

Like most of the lost boys, Francis Bok's home village in southern Sudan was attacked and burnt by Arab raiders, his family slaughtered and their cattle seized. But unlike the boys who managed to escape to refugee camps in Kenya and Uganda, Bok was captured and enslaved. His memoir, Escape from Slavery, tells of his idyllic youth, his 10 years of torment as a slave, his escape, his journey to America and his transformation into an anti-slavery activist.

It's a remarkable story, with an all-American sentiment at its core: Honesty and hard work will prevail. When Bok arrived in the U.S. in 1999, he had spent more than half of his life as a slave, herding goats and cattle in almost total isolation. He ate scraps, slept in a hut and never went to school. Within four years of his escape, he had worked factory jobs, enrolled in night school, become an anti-slavery lecturer (despite his halting English) and met an improbable array of people: George W. Bush, Coretta Scott King, and the rock singer Perry Farrell. Today Bok, 23, is six-foot-six and wears both his forehead tribal scars and Western suits and ties with pride. Only in America.

Bok wrote Escape from Slavery with the help of a journalist, Edward Tivnan, a Time magazine reporter who helped created the TV newsmagazine 20/20. The book reads like a monologue: simple, straightforward, short on adjectives and similes. The direct, emotional appeal of the writing is undeniable, but Bok's life story is cluttered at the end with chapters that try to summarize hundreds of years of conflict in the Sudan. Sadly, it's easier to put a face on slavery than to solve its conundrums.