Description:
As a child, Stephan Faris nearly failed to qualify for any country’s passport. Now, in a story that moves from South Africa to Italy to the United States, he looks at the arbitrariness of nationality. Framed by Faris’s meeting with a young orphan as a reporter in Liberia and their reencounter years later in Minnesota, Homelands makes the case for a complete rethinking of immigration policy. In a world where we’ve globalized capital, culture, and communications, are restrictions on the movement of people still morally tenable?
At a time when the immigration debate dominates the headlines, Homelands follows in the traditi
As a child, Stephan Faris nearly failed to qualify for any country’s passport. Now, in a story that moves from South Africa to Italy to the United States, he looks at the arbitrariness of nationality. Framed by Faris’s meeting with a young orphan as a reporter in Liberia and their reencounter years later in Minnesota, Homelands makes the case for a complete rethinking of immigration policy. In a world where we’ve globalized capital, culture, and communications, are restrictions on the movement of people still morally tenable?
At a time when the immigration debate dominates the headlines, Homelands follows in the tradition of George Orwell’s “Marrakech” and, more recently, Ta-Nehisi Coates’s case for reparations in The Atlantic. Drawing on more than a decade of international reporting for magazines such as Time, Bloomberg Businessweek, and The Atlantic, Faris takes readers on a ten-year journey along the borders separating war from peace in Liberia, opportunity from deprivation in Kenya, and safety from disaster today in the deadly waters off Lampedusa, an Italian holiday island that has become the scene of a refugee crisis. On the way, he uncovers a series of unsettling but ultimately redeeming parallels between modern immigration practices and the policies of South Africa’s apartheid regime.
Could we really have a world without borders? What would that look like? Based on dozens of interviews with philosophers and diplomats, aid workers and small-town mayors, and a cabinet member of South Africa’s last apartheid government, Faris’s work of fearless frontline journalism also functions as a kind of futurism. Confronting questions inflaming borders in California and Texas, France and Greece, Morocco and Spain, he takes us into the depths of one of the modern world’s most complex moral dilemmas—and returns with an answer.
PRAISE FOR STEPHAN FARIS
“Faris writes deftly about the developing world.” —Kirkus Reviews on Forecast: The Consequences of Climate Change, from the Amazon to the Arctic, from Darfur to Napa Valley
“[Faris] elegantly negotiates the tricky line between the personal and political.” —New Scientist
“Stephan Faris has traveled everywhere, holding his journalist’s looking glass up for everyone to see the same carbon-crazed climate monster looming in every reflection.” —Alan Weisman, author of The World Without Us, on Forecast
“A very deft hand, and even a touch of ironic wit . . .” —Scott Anderson, author of The Man Who Tried to Save the World
“Exceptional writing provides a vivid sense of the impact of global warming happening now. Forecast is a must-read for all those who want to understand the seriousness of this growing problem threatening our planet.” —General Anthony C. Zinni, USMC (ret.), on Forecast
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Stephan Faris is a founding member of the writers' cooperative Deca and a contributor to Time, Bloomberg Businessweek, and The Atlantic. Based in Rome, he has lived in and written from Beijing, Nairobi, Istanbul, and Lagos and covered stories across Africa, Europe, and the Middle East, including the invasion of Iraq and the civil war in Liberia. In 2002, he was awarded the Nicholas Blake Freelance Journalism Grant for his reporting from Nigeria. His book, Forecast: The Consequences of Climate Change, from the Amazon to the Arctic, from Darfur to Napa Valley, has been translated into Chinese, Japanese, and Portuguese. He has been featured as a commentator on CNN, the BBC, NPR’s To the Point, WNYC’s The Brian Lehrer Show, and elsewhere.
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Manufacturer: Deca Stories, LLC
Release date: 25 July 2014
ISBN-10 : B00M4FHQLU |
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