National Book Critics Circle Award Finalist Traveling for nearly two years and across four continents, Caroline Moorehead takes readers on a journey to understand why millions of people are forced to abandon their homes, possessions, and families in order to find a place where they may, quite literally, be allowed to live. Moorehead's experience living and working with refugees puts a human face on the news, providing unforgettable portraits of the refugees she meets in Cairo, Guinea, Sicily, Lebanon, England, Australia, Finland, and at the U.S.-Mexico border. "Human Cargo" changes our understanding of what it means to have and lose a place in the world, and reveals how the refugee "problem" is on a par with global crises such as terrorism and world hunger. Distributed by Syndetic Solutions, Inc.

The intractable, multifaceted problem of people driven from their homes by poverty, violence or persecution is given a human face in this moving survey of the refugee experience. Moorehead, a human rights journalist, refugee aid worker and biographer of Martha Gellhorn, tours a number of refugee milieus, visiting, among others, Liberian refugees in Cairo, Mexican migrants waiting to cross into the United States, Mideastern refugees detained in Australian internment camps and Palestinian refugees still nursing hopes of returning to a homeland they have never seen. She finds that refugees who remain in the Third World the majority are preoccupied with the struggle for survival. Those who make it to Western countries face an equally daunting task, caught in a legal limbo between asylum and deportation, forbidden to work, grappling with a strange language, loneliness and a society that views them as alien interlopers. Moorehead draws sympathetic portraits of individual refugees, replete with horror stories of the travails they fled and their precarious but hopeful efforts to build new lives, but also pulls back to examine what she says are the sometimes counterproductive policies of aid organizations and the indifference and callousness of Western governments. Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. From: Reed Elsevier Inc. Copyright Reed Business Information

Moorehead has been a human rights columnist in Britain and an activist working with refugees and internally displaced persons for many years. She has traveled widely to crisis spots on most continents to speak with refugees, aid workers, and others who attempt to assist refugees. Here she has combined stories heard in the field (from those who most likely meet the formal definition of a refugee) with background on individual conflicts and aid organizations. The estimated 20 million refugees from the world's trouble spots seek only a better life in a calmer place. But exclusionary government policies, especially after 9/11, create numerous obstacles. A fortunate few encounter skilled and compassionate professionals willing to believe and assist them; most encounter only the relentless boredom of "temporary" camps and underfunded aid programs. Moorehead's lyrical, moving narrative brings to life the horror that many fled, the obstacles they have had to overcome, and the medical and social consequences of their condition, recalling Roberta Cohen and Francis Deng's Forsaken People (1998). Recommended for all collections in current affairs. [See Prepub Alert, LJ 11/1/04.] Marcia L. Sprules, Council on Foreign Relations Lib., New Yor. Marcia L. Sprules, Council on Foreign Relations Lib., New York Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. From: Reed Elsevier Inc. Copyright Reed Business Information

British writer Moorehead is a superb biographer, most recently of writer of conscience Martha Gellhorn, and a newspaper columnist who has been writing about human rights for 25 years. She now presents a landmark overview of the fate of refugees as millions of people all around the world are either searching for a better life or seeking asylum after surviving persecution, rape, torture, and genocidal massacres. Moorehead begins with an invaluable and eye-opening history of twentieth-century efforts to cope with unprecedented numbers of displaced people--a story of altruism thwarted by bureaucracy, hypocrisy, prejudice, politics, greed, and fear. She then presents clarion portraits of individual refugees whose appalling predicaments searingly define the horrors of today's exodus and exile. Moorehead introduces a suicidal Iranian in a violence-prone detention camp in Australia; a mother destitute of possibilities in an impoverished camp in Guinea; a 67-year-old Palestinian who has lived in a refugee camp for 54 years; and starving Liberians in Cairo. Painstaking in her marshaling of facts and unflinching in her reportage, Moorehead purposefully illuminates the suffering endured by refugees and all the travesties, paradoxes, and tragedies engendered by the failure to act on their behalf. DonnaSeaman. From: Syndetics Solutions, Inc. Distributed by Syndetic Solutions, Inc.