The View From Flyover Country and The Displaced

These two new collections address marginalized communities and will shortly be available in the New Trier library. Look for them and upcoming displays around the school on "The Other" at New Trier.

THE VIEW FROM FLYOVER COUNTRY by Sarah Kendzior is a series of essays, most of which were originally published between 2012 and 2014 and then collated in an ebook.  As she says, “I had tracked the death of the American Dream in real time and because I focused on those who suffered, many people turned to my book for an explanation.” Now updated and available in print, Kendzior’s essays passionately describe instances of declining equality and accompanying indifference: “pundits have been proclaiming there are ‘two Americas,’ red and blue. … America is purple – purple like a bruise.” Examples of specific topics include the Midwest’s continued regional decline, the changing role of media, increasing cost of higher education, prevalence of unpaid internships, social injustices like the trial after Trayvon Martin’s death, and the risks to freedom of speech and press from authoritarian leaders. Kendzior is currently an op-ed columnist for the Globe and Mail (Toronto), has written for numerous publications, and is well-known for her research on foreign demagogues and for her coverage of the 2016 election. Writing of its aftermath, she says, “What has become known as ‘the resistance’ is simply people helping each other, an idea that is subversive under an administration that peddles cruelty as conventional.” With Kendzior’s biting insights on many social and economic issues, there is much to contemplate in THE VIEW FROM FLYOVER COUNTRY.

THE DISPLACED, edited by award-winning author Viet Thanh Nguyen, is a series of essays by refugee writers on refugee lives and that feeling of being an outsider. The writers in the sample that I saw are certainly accomplished in their fields with unique perspectives on their experience. In, “Last, First, Middle,” Joseph Azam, Senior VP at News Corp, describes his family’s move from Afghanistan and its impact on his identity and the struggle to fit in. Reyna Grande, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, describes the childhood trauma of being left behind in Mexico in “The Parent Who Stays.” Joseph Kertes, from Hungary, describes his family’s chance of a new life in Canada in “Second Country,” noting the importance of “hope, hope, hope.” Also, from Europe, there is the author of The Lazarus Project (a National Book Award finalist), Aleksander Hemon, writing about Bosnia in the 1990s (“God’s Fate”) and noting that roughly one-quarter of the country’s pre-war population is now displaced, having resettled in places like Utica, New York. He says, “The recent upsurge in bigotry directed at migrants and refugees is predictably contingent upon their dehumanization and deindividualization.” That makes these essays and stories even more important and we are considering THE DISPLACED as a reading for our Global Voices class next year. The global displacement and refugee crisis today is the largest ever – over 22.5 million people – in contrast the United States is annually allowing only 45,000 to settle here as profiled recently by The Economist. All royalties from THE DISPLACED are being donated to the International Refugee Committee.