Lost on Earth: Nomads of the New World

FROM THE PUBLISHER

In Lost on Earth: Nomads of the New World, Pulitzer Prize-winning foreign correspondent Mark Fritz leads us into the twilight world of contemporary refugees as they trek across landscapes that are continually being reshaped by the aftershocks of the end of the Cold War. Abstract events around the globe are humanized by people like Herbert Puchwein, a detective from Vienna who rescues a busload of orphans pinned down in Sarajevo, and Senada Suljic, whose family, driven from their Bosnian home, pray that their paths will cross again someday. This is the story of a bored East German girl who slips into a forest one day and finds a magical land on the other side; an engineer from Liberia who watches as his neatly constructed life is dismantled by war; a jaded, wandering nurse from Ohio who drifts from emergency room to emergency room, hooked on adrenaline until overdosing on it in Somalia. And a college student who books the ultimate adventure tour - joining the war to recapture the land that exiled him when he was an infant. Investigating the forces at play in the world, and with compassionate insight into the human will to survive, Fritz shows us where these refugees come from, why they flee, and what they encounter during their journeys.

FROM THE CRITICS

Craig Seligman - Salon

Lost on Earth, Mark Fritz's survey of the lives of contemporary refugees, reads like a volume of beautifully imagined short stories, and its addictive quality makes me wonder whether I loved it for the wrong reasons. Of course, they're the right reasons, too. In showing us the people usually reduced to terrible statistics -- in the mid-1990s, Fritz reports, roughly one out of every 100 people on the planet was forcibly uprooted from home -- he makes all those foreign tragedies that clot the opening pages of the newspaper immediate and real. And he isn't simply compassionate: Beyond the gift of empathy he has an invaluable knack for liking his troubled subjects. As in Angela's Ashes, the sparkle of personality turns a book you might expect to be unrelentingly grim into one that you don't want to end.

Fritz's characters include the displaced as well as the bureaucrats and the aid workers whose sometimes hopeless job it is to help them out. He introduces us to a Mozambican guest worker in East Germany who finds himself the object of hatred when refugees start to flood the country, and to one of those refugees, a Togolese programmer fleeing the murderous wrath of his government, who is bewildered to find himself persecuted and despised in the land where he sought safe haven. He shows us the disaster in Somalia from the standpoint of a well-to-do Mogadishu contractor and of a nurse working under the auspices of Doctors Without Borders. He lays out the chaos in Liberia (somehow making sense of an almost laughably complicated war) as it's witnessed by an enterprising mechanical engineer whose career and family unravel along with his country.

Fritz depicts the horrors in Rwanda (his dispatches from that country for the Associated Press won him the 1995 Pulitzer Prize for international reporting) through the eyes of a Tutsi girl running from the slaughter in her village and from those of a soldier in the Tutsi-dominated Rwandan Patriotic Front. His culminating chapter, on Bosnia, begins with a Muslim woman's memory of the bakery she worked in as a girl. One day an odd stranger came in; she turned out to be a native of Banja Luka returning to the town after many years, and she recalled for the girl the black morning that she came into the bakery and was told, "You cannot buy here because you are Jewish!" The girl can't imagine an era of such heartless bigotry. She has no idea, of course, that the day will come when she'll find herself in the old woman's shoes.

Fritz doesn't hector, but it's hard to argue with the dry-eyed humanitarianism of his view that "the fundamental problem [is] stopping the fighting so the noncombatants [can] simply stop running, and therefore stop dying ... Maybe the wisest solution is simply to step in fast, break up the fight and separate the combatants before too many people get hurt, rather than agonize over how they can be taught to live together. Because maybe they can't." How, you wonder after reading these stories, can we not intervene? Fritz doesn't strain for pathos or for any other effects. He's a gifted writer and his style is literary in the best sense, but he seems to have something more urgent than art on his mind, and to this end he avails himself of the ideal strategy for putting across his point of view: He shows that those others, those statistics, those faraway unfortunates, are no different, except in their circumstances, from you and me.

Douglas McGray

Fritz is at his best when he focuses on the personal lives of individual immigrants and refugees....[and at] chronicling the ways local communities respond to an influx of outsiders....[The book] erads less like a book of reportage than it does oral history, or even historical fiction....more collage than comparison. —The Washington Monthly

Publishers Weekly

Los Angeles Times correspondent Fritz presents a kaleidoscopic portrait of the world's new homeless--displaced by political upheaval or economic blight, by bloodbaths in Liberia, Kuwait and Sri Lanka, the breakup of the Soviet Union, the reunification of Germany or the conflict in what used to be Yugoslavia. Fritz, who won a Pulitzer for his reporting from Rwanda, writes from a refreshingly international perspective born of legwork rather than glib assumptions of a "global village." In a departure from his conventional reporting, these frontline dispatches are deliberately hard-boiled and ironic, unfolding like a series of loosely interconnected short stories. He writes with streetwise empathy for his dislocated subjects, among them a software expert from Togo who flees the dictatorship after his mother-in-law informs him that his wife has been murdered by state security goons and a Kuwaiti-born factory worker/computer student in Germany, ostracized by his Arab friends (even though he is of Iraqi descent) who buy into Saddam Hussein's propaganda as Iraq invades Kuwait. Fritz also dramatically profiles heroic interlopers like Viennese private eye Herbert Puchwein, who spirited a busload of orphans out of war-torn Sarajevo, and American relief worker Mary Lightfine, who plunged into Somalia's civil war. Faulting an "inherently weak" United Nations and a timid, reluctant-to-get-involved United States, Fritz boldly calls for the creation of a freestanding global police force, with international volunteers under U.S. command, dedicated to preventing future wars, genocide and forced migrations.

Library Journal

Since the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1989, 50 to 100 million people have been displaced from their homes, the largest such migration in history, according to Fritz, a correspondent for the Los Angeles Times. Uprooted by civil war, ethnic strife, or economic conditions, some are displaced within their own borders, and many others have left their home countries entirely. Fritz presents stories of individuals he has interviewed over the past decade. They include East Germans fleeing west, gypsies, Kurds, and refugees from the Yugoslav War, the Iraq-Kuwait War, and the conflicts in Liberia and Rwanda. A surprising number converged on Germany, which at first welcomed them but later closed its borders when too many refugees began to strain social and support systems. Other accounts describe the conditions in refugee camps. The stories are effectively told, but ultimately the book lacks analysis, leaving the reader feeling helpless rather than inspired. -- Marcia L. Sprules, Council on Foreign Relations Lib., New York

Douglas McGray - The Washington Monthly