The Uprooted

By conservative estimates about 50 million migrants are currently living outside of their home communities, forced to flee to obtain some measure of safety and security. In addition to persecution, human rights violations, repression, conflict, and natural and human-made disasters, current causes of forced migration include environmental and development-induced factors. Today's migrants include the internally displaced, a category that has only recently entered the international lexicon. But the legal and institutional system created in the aftermath of World War II to address refugee movements is now proving inadequate to provide appropriate assistance and protection to the full range of forced migrants needing attention today. The Uprooted is the first volume to methodically examine the progress and persistent shortcomings of the current humanitarian regime. The authors, all experts in the field of forced migration, describe the organizational, political, and conceptual shortcomings that are creating the gaps and inefficiencies of international and national agencies to reach entire categories of forced migrants. They make policy-based recommendations to improve international, regional, national, and local responses in areas including organization, security, funding, and durability of response. For all those working on behalf of the world's forced migrants, The Uprooted serves as a call to arms, emphasizing the urgent need to develop more comprehensive and cohesive strategies to address forced migration in its complexity.

"A superior exploration of the consequences of the hollowing out of our agricultural heartlands."—Kirkus Reviews In the tradition of Wendell Berry, a young writer wrestles with what we owe the places we’ve left behind. In the tiny farm town of Emmett, Idaho, there are two kinds of people: those who leave and those who stay. Those who leave go in search of greener pastures, better jobs, and college. Those who stay are left to contend with thinning communities, punishing government farm policy, and environmental decay. Grace Olmstead, now a journalist in Washington, DC, is one who left, and in Uprooted, she examines the heartbreaking consequences of uprooting—for Emmett, and for the greater heartland America. Part memoir, part journalistic investigation, Uprooted wrestles with the questions of what we owe the places we come from and what we are willing to sacrifice for profit and progress. As part of her own quest to decide whether or not to return to her roots, Olmstead revisits the stories of those who, like her great-grandparents and grandparents, made Emmett a strong community and her childhood idyllic. She looks at the stark realities of farming life today, identifying the government policies and big agriculture practices that make it almost impossible for such towns to survive. And she explores the ranks of Emmett’s newcomers and what growth means for the area’s farming tradition. Avoiding both sentimental devotion to the past and blind faith in progress, Olmstead uncovers ways modern life attacks all of our roots, both metaphorical and literal. She brings readers face to face with the damage and brain drain left in the wake of our pursuit of self-improvement, economic opportunity, and so-called growth. Ultimately, she comes to an uneasy conclusion for herself: one can cultivate habits and practices that promote rootedness wherever one may be, but: some things, once lost, cannot be recovered.

NEBULA AWARD WINNER • HUGO AWARD FINALIST • “If you want a fantasy with strong characters and brilliantly original variations on ancient stories, try Uprooted!”—Rick Riordan “Breathtaking . . . a tale that is both elegantly grand and earthily humble, familiar as a Grimm fairy tale yet fresh, original, and totally irresistible.”—Publishers Weekly (starred review) ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR: NPR, BuzzFeed, Tordotcom, BookPage, Library Journal, Publishers Weekly Agnieszka loves her valley home, her quiet village, the forests and the bright shining river. But the corrupted Wood stands on the border, full of malevolent power, and its shadow lies over her life. Her people rely on the cold, driven wizard known only as the Dragon to keep its powers at bay. But he demands a terrible price for his help: one young woman handed over to serve him for ten years, a fate almost as terrible as falling to the Wood. The next choosing is fast approaching, and Agnieszka is afraid. She knows—everyone knows—that the Dragon will take Kasia: beautiful, graceful, brave Kasia, all the things Agnieszka isn’t, and her dearest friend in the world. And there is no way to save her. But Agnieszka fears the wrong things. For when the Dragon comes, it is not Kasia he will choose. Praise for Uprooted “Uprooted has leapt forward to claim the title of Best Book I’ve Read Yet This Year. . . . Moving, heartbreaking, and thoroughly satisfying, Uprooted is the fantasy novel I feel I’ve been waiting a lifetime for. Clear your schedule before picking it up, because you won’t want to put it down.”—NPR

untold: defining moments of the uprooted is a collection of real stories that explores the South Asian experience in the U.S., U.K., and Canada through the lens of identity, being, and relationships. Thirty-two emerging voices share deeply personal moments relating to immigration, infertility, divorce, mental health, suicide, sexual orientation, gender identity, racism, colorism, casteism, religion, and much more, all while balancing the push and pull of belonging to two cultural hemispheres. Every story sheds light on the authentic truths of living as womxn with hyphenated identities that have only been whispered - until now.

Gamaliel Friedman is only a child when his family flees Czechoslovakia in 1939 for the relative safety of Hungary. For him, it will be the beginning of a life of rootlessness, disguise, and longing. Five years later, in desperation, Gamaliel’s parents entrust him to a young Christian cabaret singer named Ilonka. With his Jewish identity hidden, Gamaliel survives the war. But in 1956, to escape the stranglehold of communism, he leaves Budapest after painfully parting from Ilonka. Gamaliel tries, unsuccessfully, to find a place for himself in Europe. After a failed marriage, he moves to New York, where he works as a ghostwriter, living through the lives of others. Eventually he falls in with a group of exiles, including a rabbi––a mystic whose belief in the potential for grace in everyday life powerfully counters Gamaliel’s feelings of loss and dispossession. When Gamaliel is asked to help draw out an elderly, disfigured Hungarian woman who may be his beloved Ilonka, he begins to understand that a real life in the present is possible only if he will reconcile with his past.

“Uprooted reveals how a late-life uprooting changed Dickey as a gardener.” —The Wall Street Journal When Page Dickey moved away from her celebrated garden at Duck Hill, she left a landscape she had spent thirty-four years making, nurturing, and loving. She found her next chapter in northwestern Connecticut, on 17 acres of rolling fields and woodland around a former Methodist church. In Uprooted, Dickey reflects on this transition and on what it means for a gardener to start again. In these pages, fol­low her journey: searching for a new home, discovering the ins and outs of the landscape surround­ing her new garden, establishing the garden, and learning how to be a different kind of gardener. The sur­prise at the heart of the book? Although Dickey was sad to leave her beloved garden, she found herself thrilled to begin a new garden in a wilder, larger landscape. Written with humor and elegance, Uprooted is an endearing story about transitions—and the satisfaction and joy that new horizons can bring.

Publisher Description

Whiteman, who escaped from Nazi-occupied Austria with her family, is now a clinical psychologist in New York. Her impassioned, riveting study of the Jews who managed to leave Germany and Austria before Hitler implemented mass executions and death camps is based partly on interviews with 190 escapees. She tells the incredible story of the Kindertransport operation, which took 10,000 Jewish children from Nazi-occupied countries to England by train and ferry. Adolf Eichmann, then an emigration official, disdainfully approved this mass exodus. We learn of the formidable barriers escapees faced in getting out, of horrid or supportive foster homes, of the trauma and pain of being forcibly uprooted. Many escapees endured years of poverty before re-establihsing themselves. Whiteman rejects Hannah Arendt's thesis that German Jews' cultural assimilation led to their political blindness in a "fool's paradise." This is a distinctive contribution to Holocaust literature.