An intimate and rigorously reported portrait of desperate lives.
An exile's dream of coming to America.
Foreign correspondent McCormick, an editor at Foreign Affairs, makes his book debut with a riveting narrative of the plight of refugees. Based in Kenya from 2015 to 2018 as the Africa editor of Foreign Policy, McCormick met Asad Hussein, who had been born in a refugee camp in 1995 a few years after his family fled war-torn Somalia. Now home to second and third generations of refugees, “permanent exiles facing a lifetime in waiting,” the facility houses hundreds of thousands who live in brutal conditions, many—like Asad’s family—applying for resettlement. McCormick recounts the family’s frustrations as their application failed repeatedly, derailed by endless snarls. Drawing on copious interviews, the author creates a palpable sense of life in the camp, his notebooks “overflowing with damning testimony” of the refugees’ victimization at the hands of corrupt or malevolent officials, even before Trump’s policies exacerbated their situation. Asad’s older sister, who had married, had been able to settle in the U.S. while the rest of the family languished. When his parents’ case finally was settled—after 13 years—Asad and his siblings were left behind. Determined to find a way to leave, Asad devoted himself to studying hard, reading in his school’s library, and writing, sending essays to newspapers and magazines. In 2016, the New York Times Magazine accepted a piece about his sister’s return visit to the camp. “Suddenly,” McCormick writes, “the self-taught refugee writer” became a minor celebrity. Doors opened—scholarships, an internship—but were just as likely to slam shut. “The cascade of Asad-related crises became a kind of drumbeat to our lives,” writes the author. Problems at his school, with the College Board, the Kenyan government, and the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees, “all threatened to upend his best-laid plans at various times.” Yet, as McCormick discloses in the opening pages of this moving book, Asad prevailed, an exception to the lives of so many others.
An intimate and rigorously reported portrait of desperate lives.Pub Date: March 30, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-250-24060-6
Page Count: 224
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Jan. 12, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2021
This is a man who has seen it all, and he sure does know how to tell a story.
Fighting back against a nearly fatal health crisis, a renowned foreign correspondent reviews his career.
New York Times journalist Nordland, a Pulitzer Prize winner, has reported from more than 150 countries. Working in Delhi on July 4, 2019, he had a seizure and lost consciousness. At that point, he began his “second life,” one defined by a glioblastoma multiforme tumor. “From 3 to 6 percent of glioblastoma patients are cured; one of them will bear my name,” writes the author, while claiming that the disease “has proved to be the best thing that ever happened to me.” From the perspective of his second life, which marked the end of his estrangement from his adult children, he reflects on his first, which began with a difficult childhood in Philadelphia. His abusive father was a “predatory pedophile.” His mother, fortunately, was “astonishingly patient and saintly,” and Nordland and his younger siblings stuck close together. After a brief phase of youthful criminality, the author began his career in journalism at the Penn State campus newspaper. Interspersing numerous landmark articles—some less interesting than others, but the best are wonderful—Nordland shows how he carried out the burden of being his father’s son: “Whether in Bosnia or Kabul, Cambodia or Nigeria, Philadelphia or Baghdad, I always seemed to gravitate toward stories about vulnerable people, especially women and children—since they will always be the most vulnerable in any society—being exploited or mistreated by powerful men or powerful social norms.” Indeed, some of the stories reveal the worst in human nature. A final section, detailing his life since his diagnosis in chapters such as “I Forget the Name of This Chapter: On Memory,” wraps up the narrative with humor, candor, and reflection.
This is a man who has seen it all, and he sure does know how to tell a story.Pub Date: March 5, 2024
ISBN: 9780063096226
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Mariner Books
Review Posted Online: Nov. 14, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2023
BOOK REVIEW
From the national correspondent for PBS's MacNeil-Lehrer Newshour: a moving memoir of her youth in the Deep South and her role in desegregating the Univ. of Georgia. The eldest daughter of an army chaplain, Hunter-Gault was born in what she calls the ``first of many places that I would call `my place' ''—the small village of Due West, tucked away in a remote little corner of South Carolina. While her father served in Korea, Hunter-Gault and her mother moved first to Covington, Georgia, and then to Atlanta. In ``L.A.'' (lovely Atlanta), surrounded by her loving family and a close-knit black community, the author enjoyed a happy childhood participating in activities at church and at school, where her intellectual and leadership abilities soon were noticed by both faculty and peers. In high school, Hunter-Gault found herself studying the ``comic-strip character Brenda Starr as I might have studied a journalism textbook, had there been one.'' Determined to be a journalist, she applied to several colleges—all outside of Georgia, for ``to discourage the possibility that a black student would even think of applying to one of those white schools, the state provided money for black students'' to study out of state. Accepted at Michigan's Wayne State, the author was encouraged by local civil-rights leaders to apply, along with another classmate, to the Univ. of Georgia as well. Her application became a test of changing racial attitudes, as well as of the growing strength of the civil-rights movement in the South, and Gault became a national figure as she braved an onslaught of hostilities and harassment to become the first black woman to attend the university. A remarkably generous, fair-minded account of overcoming some of the biggest, and most intractable, obstacles ever deployed by southern racists. (Photographs—not seen.)
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1992
ISBN: 0-374-17563-2
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1992
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