http://www.powells.com/review/2007_04_19.html

he hits the nail on the head:

“In the case of What Is the What, Eggers has made the very daring decision not only to fictionalize about extreme events that he never experienced, but to base his fictions of genocide on the true story of a real, living person. This might be his way of addressing precisely his lack of experience. But then why go to all the narrative trouble? Eggers could just as well have transcribed Deng’s extraordinary story without fictionalizing it. The unadorned story, the true story humbly recorded and presented, would not have been lacking in force. The eerie, slightly sickening quality about What Is the What is that Deng’s personhood has been displaced by someone else’s style and sensibility — by someone else’s story. Deng survived his would-be killers in the Sudan, only to have his identity erased here.”

And

“And Eggers’s book is also another unsettling thing. I never thought I would reach for this vocabulary, but What Is the What’s innocent expropriation of another man’s identity is a post-colonial arrogance — the most socially acceptable instance of Orientalism you are likely to encounter. Perhaps this is the next stage of American memoir. Perhaps, having run out of marketable stories to tell about ourselves, we will now travel the world in search of desperate people willing to rent out their lives, the way indigent people in some desolate places give up their children. Perhaps we have picked our psyches clean, and now we need other people’s stories the way we need other people’s oil.”

Oh, and I’ve left a few comments on various posts on your blog but count me out from the contest since I live outside the U.S.