Beyond the Sand and Sea

December 7, 2020
Foreign Affairs editor McCormick debuts with a moving and meticulously researched portrait of Asad Hussein, a Somali refugee born in the Dadaab Refugee Complex in Kenya, who won a full scholarship to Princeton. After fleeing the Somali Civil War in 1991, Asad’s family were among the hundreds of thousands of residents “kept alive but prevented from living” at Dadaab. The family clung to the hope of making it to America, and, in 2004, nine-year-old Asad and his family were called for medical exams, the first step in the resettlement process. The male nurse in charge of the clinic asked to marry Asad’s 14-year-old sister, however; when she refused, the family’s resettlement case stalled. Meanwhile, Asad, an avid reader and aspiring writer, sought a way out through academics, eventually winning a scholarship to a boarding school in Nairobi and then becoming the first refugee from Dadaab accepted to Princeton, where he started in the fall of 2018. His parents had arrived in the U.S. in early 2017, just beating President Trump’s ban on refugees from Somalia and other Muslim-majority countries. McCormick enriches the story with vivid character profiles and history lessons, using Asad’s story to illuminate the plight of refugees around the world. This heart-wrenching account ends on a high note.

February 1, 2021

Asad Hussein was born in Kenya's Dadaab refugee camp to ethnic Somali parents and never journeyed outside the camp until he was 15 years old. Yet, he felt privileged, as the camp provided quality schooling along with a library funded by aid agencies. He read voraciously and pursued his studies above all other priorities, earning him the nickname "The Professor." He wrote op-ed pieces for publications, including the New York Times Magazine. Through determination in the face of hopelessness, he was admitted to Princeton's class of 2022 on a full scholarship. He could now read Michelle Obama's thesis from the library and shared her opinion that, "My experiences at Princeton have made me far more aware of my Blackness than ever before." Asad was no longer a Somali or a refugee, but a Black man on a primarily white campus. Journalist McCormick met Asad while researching President Trump's 2017 travel ban and its denial of sanctuary for the residents of Dadaab. Although the book often meanders, the secondary characters serve to poetically emphasize the tragic stories of refugees refused much-needed shelter by capacious legislation. VERDICT A simultaneously disheartening and uplifting journey for readers interested in social justice, racial politics, and current events.--Jessica Bushore, Xenia, OH

Copyright 2021 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

Starred review from February 1, 2021
An exile's dream of coming to America. Foreign correspondent McCormick, an editor at Foreign Affairs, makes his book debut with a riveting narrative of the plight of refugees. Based in Kenya from 2015 to 2018 as the Africa editor of Foreign Policy, McCormick met Asad Hussein, who had been born in a refugee camp in 1995 a few years after his family fled war-torn Somalia. Now home to second and third generations of refugees, "permanent exiles facing a lifetime in waiting," the facility houses hundreds of thousands who live in brutal conditions, many--like Asad's family--applying for resettlement. McCormick recounts the family's frustrations as their application failed repeatedly, derailed by endless snarls. Drawing on copious interviews, the author creates a palpable sense of life in the camp, his notebooks "overflowing with damning testimony" of the refugees' victimization at the hands of corrupt or malevolent officials, even before Trump's policies exacerbated their situation. Asad's older sister, who had married, had been able to settle in the U.S. while the rest of the family languished. When his parents' case finally was settled--after 13 years--Asad and his siblings were left behind. Determined to find a way to leave, Asad devoted himself to studying hard, reading in his school's library, and writing, sending essays to newspapers and magazines. In 2016, the New York Times Magazine accepted a piece about his sister's return visit to the camp. "Suddenly," McCormick writes, "the self-taught refugee writer" became a minor celebrity. Doors opened--scholarships, an internship--but were just as likely to slam shut. "The cascade of Asad-related crises became a kind of drumbeat to our lives," writes the author. Problems at his school, with the College Board, the Kenyan government, and the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees, "all threatened to upend his best-laid plans at various times." Yet, as McCormick discloses in the opening pages of this moving book, Asad prevailed, an exception to the lives of so many others. An intimate and rigorously reported portrait of desperate lives.

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