In this Book
- What Wars Leave Behind: The Faceless and the Forgotten
- Book
- 2014
- Published by: University of Missouri Press
summary
They bear labels instead of names—noncombatant, unintended victim, collateral damage. Theirs are the blurred faces and forms seen in news footage shot from a moving vehicle. And when soldiers, media, and profiteers move on to the next conflict, they stay behind to cope amid the wreckage. They have stories to tell to anyone who will pause long enough to hear them.
In What Wars Leave Behind, J. Malcolm Garcia reveals the people and pain behind the statistics. He writes about impoverished families scraping by in Cairo’s city of the dead, ordinary Syrians pretending all is well as shells explode around them, and others caught in conflicts that rage long after the cameramen have packed up and gone away.
Garcia describes his travels in some of the world’s hotspots in Central Asia, the Middle East, and Africa. In a series of personal travel essays that read like short stories, he exposes the endless messiness of war and the failings of good intentions, and he traces their impact on the lives of natives in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Egypt, Kosovo, Chad, and Syria. He discovers amazing resilience among people who must struggle just to survive each day.
Garcia gives readers the sort of gritty detail learned from immersing himself in other cultures. He eats the food, drinks the tea, and endures the oppressive heat. These are the stories of how a middle-class guy from the Midwest with a social work degree learned to experience and embrace the cultures of Third World countries in conflict—and lived to tell the tale.
Table of Contents
Download Full Book
- Acknowledgments
- pp. vii-viii
- Introduction
- pp. 1-4
- Part 1: Conflict Zones
- 1. Securing District 4
- pp. 7-10
- 2. Beneath Us the Ground Still Moves
- pp. 11-34
- 3. African Promise
- pp. 35-64
- 4. Who Is in the Power?
- pp. 65-84
- 5. The Dead Lieutenant
- pp. 85-98
- 6. Revolution Download
- pp. 99-114
- Part 2: Lost and Gone
- 8. Missing
- pp. 135-150
- 9. Here Everything Is Poison
- pp. 151-166
- 10. Bed 18
- pp. 167-180
- 11. Pyramid Schemes
- pp. 181-196
- 12. War Wounds
- pp. 197-212
- 13. Maybe the Children Will Forget
- pp. 213-230
- Part 3: Home Bound
- 14. Unpaid Leave
- pp. 233-246
- 15. City of the Dead
- pp. 247-256
Additional Information
ISBN
9780826273260
Related ISBN(s)
9780826220219, 9780826222756
MARC Record
OCLC
883820205
Pages
269
Launched on MUSE
2014-07-16
Language
English
Open Access
No