A Map of Future Ruins

Starred review from December 18, 2023
Journalist Markham (The Far Away Brothers) blends memoir, history, and reportage in a wide-ranging and unflinching account of Moria, an overcrowded refugee camp on the Greek island of Lesbos that burned to the ground in September 2020. Sent by a magazine to investigate the 2021 conviction of six Afghans charged with the Moria arson, Markham depicts the trial as biased and unjust (it lasted only 7 hours) and delves into the backgrounds of the convicted youths (three of the six convicts were minors), particularly Ali Sayed, whose grueling journey to Lesbos she traces from Afghanistan. Into this heart-wrenching drama (which includes international efforts to establish credible forensic evidence of the convicts’ innocence for their forthcoming appeal), Markham interweaves ruminations on Greece’s twin crises of immigration and emigration (she notes that “a million refugees had arrived in Greece by sea alone in recent years,” even as more than half a million Greek nationals had emigrated since 2008 due to dismal economic conditions); the mass expulsion of Greeks from Turkey 100 years ago, many of whom also arrived as refugees in Lesbos; the story of her family’s roots as American immigrants from Greece; and the evolution of the U.S. immigration system from the “indignities of Ellis Island” to the present-day asylum process, which incarcerates tens of thousands every day. Interspersed throughout are powerful ruminations on ancient Greece as the birthplace of classical Western ideals and the myth-making process inherent to all migration stories. Readers will be thoroughly engrossed.

Starred review from December 1, 2023
A journalist's self-aware exploration of borders and the myths used to draw them. Markham, author of The Far Away Brothers, has spent two decades reporting from some of the world's most chaotic borders, telling the stories of those left at their mercy. In her latest book, she takes a heartbreaking account--of a fire that decimated a refugee camp on the Greek island of Lesbos and the Afghan youth falsely accused of setting it--and winds it together with her family's history of immigrating from Greece, as well as commentary on the entanglement of human migration and existence itself. The author chronicles her interviews with residents of the camp, the legal team for the accused, the Greek residents who surrounded them with varying degrees of hospitality and sympathy, and members of her own family. She also draws from the insight and wisdom of Soviet refugee Svetlana Boym. Greece's position in the Western imagination--reflected in its myths and its influences on Western thought and even whiteness--and its often misrepresented history, create a thought-provoking and frustratingly circular backdrop for Markham's endeavor, one often ignored or obscured in even the most probing media coverage. Many of the narrative threads could justify being their own book, and the author's tight prose, character-driven storytelling, and humility clearly demonstrate the desperation at the heart of forced migration. She effectively calls out the callousness of the creators of, investors in, and patrollers of borders. Markham's refreshingly self-conscious rumination on the project of a journalist, as well as her understanding of both the potential pitfalls and possible impact of her empathetic text, reinforce her interrogation of the "stories humans have created to make sense of our existence," the maps we have drawn to depict those stories, and the elusive nature of truth. A remarkable, unnerving, and cautionary portrait of a global immigration crisis.

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January 1, 2024
Markham (The Far Away Brothers, 2019) relied on her experience reporting on immigration stories around the world for this hybrid memoir juxtaposing her personal history with the ongoing social and political upheaval that accompanied the last decade's arrival of refugees in Greece. Shifting from coverage of the 2020 fire at the Moria refugee camp, which resulted in the dubious arrest and conviction of four young Afghan men, she writes of her own visits to the region, her family's Greek roots, and the turbulent local context for the immigrants that encompasses the camp and other areas directly impacted by asylum seekers. Her investigation into Moria grounds the narrative as Markham moves back and forth in history while considering long-held myths about Greece's position in Western civilization and how the country's storied past looms over its present. Ultimately, the notion of borders themselves is challenged as it clashes with the vast history of human movement. A personal, illuminating, and thought-provoking narrative.

COPYRIGHT(2024) Booklist, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.