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    City of Thorns: Nine Lives in the World's Largest Refugee Camp
    City of Thorns: Nine Lives in the World's Largest Refugee Camp
    City of Thorns: Nine Lives in the World's Largest Refugee Camp
    Audiobook11 hours

    City of Thorns: Nine Lives in the World's Largest Refugee Camp

    Written by Ben Rawlence

    Narrated by Derek Perkins

    3.5/5

    ()

    About this audiobook

    Situated hundreds of miles from any other settlement, deep within the inhospitable desert of northern Kenya, Dadaab is a city like no other. Its buildings are made from mud, sticks, or plastic, its entire economy is grey, and its citizens survive on rations and luck. Over the course of four years, Ben Rawlence became a first-hand witness to a strange and desperate limbo-land, getting to know many of those who have come there seeking sanctuary. Among them are Guled, a former child soldier who lives for football; Nisho, who scrapes an existence by pushing a wheelbarrow and dreaming of riches; and schoolgirl Kheyro, whose future hangs upon her education.

    In City of Thorns, Rawlence interweaves the stories of nine individuals to show what life is like in the camp and to sketch the wider political forces that keep the refugees trapped there. Rawlence combines intimate storytelling with broad socio-political investigative journalism, doing for Dadaab what Katherine Boo's Behind the Beautiful Forevers did for the Mumbai slums. Lucid, vivid, and illuminating, City of Thorns is an urgent human story with deep international repercussions, brought to life through the people who call Dadaab home.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherTantor Media, Inc
    Release dateApr 26, 2016
    ISBN9781515975045
    City of Thorns: Nine Lives in the World's Largest Refugee Camp
    Author

    Ben Rawlence

    Ben Rawlence is a former researcher for Human Rights Watch in the horn of Africa. He is the author of City of Thorns and Radio Congo and has written for a wide range of publications, including The Guardian, the London Review of Books, and Prospect. He is the founder and director of Black Mountains College and lives with his family in Wales.

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    Reviews for City of Thorns

    3.5/5

    48 ratings6 reviews

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    • 4/5
      More proof that the people who control your food supply ultimately control you.
    • 5/5
      This book looks at the lives of several people who live in Dabaab, a large refugee camp located in a desert in Kenya. The book describes how many of these people came to live there, what their lives were like once there and how the nation of Kenya, as well as the rest of the world, views and treats them. The author combines events from the world with the things that happened in Dababb in a highly readable and understandable way. While I had some doubts about this book when I first picked it up, I have gained a great deal of knowledge and understanding concerning this area of the world from this author’s perspective. The author is a great storyteller.
    • 4/5
      Ben Rawlence’s scrupulous (and sometimes dangerous) research informs his “City of Thorns: Nine Lives in the World’s Largest Refugee Camp.” In 1992, Dadaab camp was built in Kenya at the southern border with Somalia. At its height, it contained over half a million souls. We experience daily life and travails there with people such as Gelud, forced as a child as a soldier into al-Shabaad, Somalia’s al-Qaida-linked insurgent terrorists. His escape puts him in danger should he ever return. Nisho, a porter with dreams of advancing in his native camp’s underground economy. Professor White Eyes, whose kindly acts are a beacon to his neighbors and the book’s readers. Muna, a Somalian Muslim, and Monday, a Sudanese Christian, whose very relationship puts them in danger of assassination from fundamentalist clans. These and others bring a humanity to a complex situation involving the UNHCR, other refugee and human rights agencies, multiple governments, and specifically the ever changing political scene in Kenya and Somalia. In the meantime, the resident refugees live lives of dignity, industry and courage filled with "impossible dreams and a nightmarish reality."
    • 3/5
      About a dozen refugees are interviewed about their lives before and after they enter the Dadaab refugee camp on the Somalia-Kenya border.
    • 4/5
      Powerful book on the Dadaab refugee camp for Somalis driven out of their country into Kenya because of drought and war. Yet this huge refugee camp in the desert is inhospitable in so many ways--corruption, lack of jobs, brutality and yet refugees come and come and come. Rawlence tells the stories of 9 inhabitants who struggle desperately--their reasons for being there, their life while there, and what happens to each--he also turns over his profit from the book to helping them. Youth leader becomes disillusioned, young teacher gets the education she needs to perhaps survive, etc. Rawlence also analyses the AID programs, the UN programs, and the Kenyan government, the Somali smugglers--all keeping these refugees poor, starving, and with no options. The book has no pollyanna ending as the struggle continues.
    • 4/5
      The stories of the inhabitants of the largest refugee camp in the world was heartbreaking. Whole generations that have been born in the camps and know no other way of life, with no "home" to go back to, either ravished by war or famine. This was a harrowing look at the limited opportunities available to the youth of the Dadaab camp, as well as the dangers and sub-standard living of day to day camp life.