SALON, in presenting its annual book awards: “Mark Fritz lays out his tales of refugees and refugee workers with a short-story master's feel for character and plot. He has a real talent for affability: Almost without exception he likes the people whose stories he tells, and while their hardships obviously matter to him, what captures his imagination and his skill is their personalities. His portraits of the uprooted encompass natives of lands as diverse as Germany and Iraq and Togo and Bosnia, but no one he writes about seems foreign; he puts us in his subjects' shoes by showing us how very much like us they are. (And he drives home the point that there is no longer anything anomalous about their experience, reporting that in the mid-1990s, roughly one out of every 100 people on the planet was forcibly uprooted from home.) He also has a gift for making tangled clashes (the Liberian civil war, for instance) easy to follow without talking down in the process. Although Fritz's subject matter is cruel, his book is strangely delightful -- on one level an outcry against acts of inhumanity, but on another a celebration of our common humanity.”
