You Shall Know Our Velocity

by Dave Eggers

Will and Hand (real name: Sven) recently lost their best friend Jack and try to cope with the loss in the only way they know how. Will came into money some years ago (how is never detailled) and they now decide to spend a week to fly to as many countries as possible to hand out cash. They believe their destinations of choice to be sufficiently poor and the people they hand the cash to in need of it.

Due to their last minute and poor planning, they are unable to go to their original first destination, Greenland. The flights are grounded because of heavy winds, so they fly to Senegal instead, where they want to spend about one day and then move on quickly to the next poor nation. However, they get sidetracked almost immediately.

They make up elaborate concepts they don't follow through on. For example, they want to tape money to donkeys with a cryptic message. They expect the donkeys to just stand around unattended, but never find any that fit their expectations. The duo does get rid of wads of cash at times. Once, they put it in the pockets of pants hanging on a clothesline. Then they hand it to a kid they played basketball with. When they get desperate they have cabs drive them around the block and overpay them.

Moving on to the next destination is not as easy as they expected. They are somewhat suprised that there would be no daily flights to just anywhere. Worse still, they are supposed to acquire visa for certain destinations. In the end, they decide on Estonia, via London. There, unsurprisingly, they have similar difficulties.

Their elaborate one-week trip around the world (more or less) ends with them only making two countries. Then Hand has to return to his job in St. Louis and Will has to move on to Mexico for a wedding.

As strange as all of this may sound this is a quite moving books about two friends that cannot quite deal with the loss of their friend and their inability to save him despite their thinking outside the box and the willingness to (literally) give everything they have for it.

7/10