The residents of Clarkston, Georgia (population: 7,100; 13 miles east of Atlanta), are the involuntary participants in a tricky sociological experiment. Take a small, conservative suburb, resettle refugees from more than 50 trouble-plagued countries in its low-rent apartment complexes, and see what happens. Initial misunderstanding and tension are inevitable. But then what? Regardless of locale, teenage boys want to make friends and play games. If they’re from outside the United States, they’re likely to gravitate to soccer, that most international of sports. So it is in Clarkston, where an energetic young Jordanian woman, Luma Mufleh, has created and coached a somewhat rackety youth team called the Fugees (“re-fugees”).

In Outcasts United, New York Times reporter Warren St. John (Rammer Jammer Yellow Hammer) follows Mufleh and her team of Africans, Arabs, Eastern Europeans, etc., through their 2006 season. He uses it as an effective framework for exploring the internal globalization of the United States, as the players learn to live with each other, more affluent teams, and the town’s sometimes-resentful American-born residents.

The Fugees are actually three teams, split by age into under-13s, under-15s and under-17s. The older boys are more self-sufficient, so St. John focuses on the first two groups. During the course of the season, one struggles mightily, while one becomes more cohesive. Mufleh, dedicated, tough, occasionally rigid, has her own stumbles, but overall provides a remarkable degree of support to traumatized boys who have known little but dislocation and discrimination.

St. John interweaves the games with the backstories of several players. Though they start in different countries, their stories seem tragically similar. We learn about the mothers who have brought their families out of ethnic massacres to refugee camps, then to the alleged promised land of the U.S. They find themselves working night shifts in hotels and poultry plants while worrying that their children are losing their traditional values in crime-ridden neighborhoods. One of the book’s strengths is its honesty. The outcome is not all positive. Progress is fitful. Apparent allies renege on promises. Even talented players lose games. Yet, somehow, they persevere. Clarkston adapts.
 

Hooman Majd’s aim in The Ayatollah Begs to Differ: The Paradox of Modern Iran is to demonstrate that his native country is not the monolithic society depicted by the Bush administration and essentially regurgitated by the American press. While he describes a population molded and imprinted by incessant religious practices and understandably suspicious of the West, Majd also takes readers into fashionable parties where men and women converse easily on equal footing and where the officially forbidden liquor flows freely. Then there are the pious households of the common folk, in which men spend their days smoking an opium derivative called "shir’e" and watching the alluring secular images pumped in from Dubai via satellite television.

Majd is particularly well suited to reveal the inner workings of Iranian society. Born in Tehran, the son of a diplomat for the Shah who was deposed by the 1979 Islamic revolution, he is also the grandson of a revered ayatollah and a close relative of former Iranian President Seyyed Mohammad Khatami. Educated in England, America and other diplomatic outposts, Majd eventually settled in the U.S., where he still lives. His connections to Iran were such that he was chosen to accompany Khatami on his 2005 U.S. tour and to serve as President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s interpreter at the United Nations in 2006 and 2007. Most of Majd’s accounts and observations here stem from his extended visits to his home country in 2004, 2005 and 2007, during which time he sampled, without substantial restriction, the popular mood at all class levels.

Majd makes much of the fact that political criticism is open and generally tolerated and that the government is inclined to let its citizens conduct their lives as they wish – as long as they do so within their own homes and at private gatherings. But he doesn’t paint too pretty a picture of a system that’s still under the command of a few powerful men who are essentially accountable only to their peers. The public executions, usually hanging the unfortunates from a crane, are matter-of-fact, brutal and blithely accepted by the populace. Still, Majd makes the case that outsiders will be best served by knowing the people they aspire to cower, control or bargain with.

RELATED CONTENT

Majd’s trailer for the book:

For a moment, set aside consideration of the well-known humanitarian crises of recent years in Lebanon, Iraq, Colombia, Darfur and Zimbabwe, and contemplate northern Uganda. A rebel militia called the Lord’s Resistance Army has kidnapped 20,000 children from that region in the last two decades to swell its ranks. Until a ceasefire in 2006, an estimated 40,000 children left their homes every night to gather at public meeting points, seeking safety in numbers.

Did you know that? Probably not. The international system for helping the oppressed is what humanitarian activist Jan Egeland calls an “immoral lottery.” Some get attention and aid; others might as well be invisible. Egeland thinks it’s a lousy system that needs to be overhauled. He makes his case with strong effect in A Billion Lives: An Eyewitness Report from the Frontlines of Humanity, his memoir of his tenure from 2003-2006 as the United Nations’ top emergency relief official.

Egeland, a Norwegian steeped in his country’s tradition of unaligned social activism, literally risked his life to negotiate with rebel leaders in Uganda, with some modest success. It’s what he’s always done, during his time at the UN, Amnesty International and the Norwegian Red Cross: He parachutes into horrendous crises, unflinchingly confronts all sides and usually manages to alleviate the suffering. But he knows better than anyone that he seldom makes much long-term difference.

As Egeland takes us along on his UN journeys to Latin America, the South Pacific tsunami zone, the Middle East and Africa, he is an equal opportunity critic. The U.S., he says, is generous with emergency money for natural disasters, but miserly with development aid. The leaders of developing nations, the “South,” too often refuse to take responsibility in their own regions. China pretends it’s still a beleaguered underdog rather than the rich superpower it is. Time and time again, both sides in conflicts are intransigent and incompetent, content to see innocents suffer rather than compromise their hard-line positions.

It’s a sad picture, but Egeland has some hope. We have all the tools for coherent multilateralism, he argues in his final prescriptive chapter. We just need the political will and the compassion.

Anne Bartlett is a journalist in Washington, D.C.

There’s a new entry among hot self-help topics. In his latest book, Who’s Your City?, Richard Florida (The Rise of the Creative Class) makes a strong case for place being just as relevant and crucial to our well-being as finding the perfect mate or achieving the ideal weight. Where we choose to live, he writes, “can determine the income we earn, the people we meet, the friends we make, the partners we choose, and the options available to our children and families. . . . In many ways, it is a prerequisite to everything else.”
So, where to go? Boston? Chicago? Austin? San Francisco? Center city, suburbs or outlying areas? As Florida points out, different areas have different personalities just as we do—see chapter 11 to discover which of the “Big Five” personality categories you fall into. But a psychological fit is not enough. Not surprisingly then, some cities and regions show up in several slots on his guides to the “Best Places” to live according to a person’s life stage and situation. Whether you are male, female, heterosexual, gay or lesbian, or whether you are single, a mid-career professional, married with or without children, or looking to retire, when things go awry in life, Florida stresses that it is easier to put things back together when there are job opportunities and social opportunities for dating or just hanging out.
Who’s Your City? is well-documented with statistics, maps and charts for the scholarly. But Florida’s down-to-earth writing and 10-step plan for choosing the place that fits best will help make deciding where to settle a most enjoyable endeavor.
Linda Stankard is a real estate agent in New York.

<b>America’s new gilded age</b> Size really matters here: the square footage of your mansion; the length of your yacht; the number of seats on your private plane; and most importantly, the breadth of your bank account. Welcome to <b>Richistan</b>, where the nouveau riche flaunt their wealth through increasingly ostentatious gestures. <b>Richistan</b> is a work of nonfiction, but when author Robert Frank relates the outrageous stories of the wealthy people he encounters, it reads like fiction. And why not? These people, with incomes ranging from $100 million to $1 billion, are living in an unreal world.

These aren’t the stories of the dignified old rich. They are tales of new money, made through conventional means, such as technology and hedge fund management, and some unconventional ways, like those who became billionaires selling tiny ceramic villages and pool toys. They aren’t modest about their newfound wealth, either, they’re anxious to be acknowledged and accepted.

Frank discovered these newly rich while researching an article for the <i>Wall Street Journal</i>, and turned this tiny niche of the population into his full-time focus. He discovered that today’s rich had built a self-contained world unto themselves, complete with their own health-care system (concierge doctors), travel network (Net Jets, destination clubs), separate economy (double-digit income gains and double-digit inflation) and language (Who’s your household manager?’). <b>Richistan</b> offers an insightful and often humorous glimpse of life in Beverly Hills and Palm Beach. It is a fun, lively book that allows readers to vicariously experience the glamorous lives of the members of America’s new gilded age.

<i>John T. Slania is a journalism professor at Loyola University in Chicago.</i>

It used to be that more was better. Industrialization, urbanization, specialization and capitalism made people wealthier, healthier and happier. But where are we now? In his new book Deep Economy: The Wealth of Communities and the Durable Future, Bill McKibben poses the controversial theory that economic growth and industrial expansion just aren’t as good for people as they used to be. While the Industrial Revolution gave birth to widely dispersed wealth and a new middle class, McKibben cites statistics that suggest around 80 percent of us are poorer today than we were five years ago, relative to the cost of living.

And we’re unhappier, too as measured by statistics on depression and surveys that ask people point-blank if they’ve considered suicide. Many people feel unconnected to family and neighbors. Bigger houses help us live out TV-generated fantasies of the American dream, but they also make us more lonely. We eat cheap corporate junk that was trucked in from over a thousand miles away. And the accumulation of greenhouse gases a direct result of unchecked growth threatens the very survival of our planet.

If more money, more acres and more cheap tortilla chips are no longer the secret to happiness, what is? Farmers markets, as they symbolize the kind of future McKibben would like to see. Such markets provide an outlet for small-scale, organic, non-corporate farmers offering food that hasn’t grown tired in its journey from California or Florida. And they provide an opportunity to connect with other people, the beginnings of community. Most of all, they provide a business paradigm that unhooks people from a system of reckless growth.

In short, McKibben thinks we need another kind of bottom line that doesn’t just measure profit, but also measures fulfillment and a sense of connection. He notes in his first chapter that two birds named More and Better used to roost together on the same tree branch. But these days, McKibben writes, Better has flown a few trees over to make her nest. That changes everything. Lynn Hamilton writes from Tybee Island, Georgia.

In the recent debates over the appointments of John Roberts and Samuel Alito to the U.S. Supreme Court, much energy was expended by both left and right on ferreting out their supposed political opinions on abortion, affirmative action and presidential power. Given the history of our highest court, the time might have been better spent figuring out how well Roberts and Alito play with others that is, what kind of personal temperaments they bring to the nine-justice meetings that review our laws. Jeffrey Rosen’s The Supreme Court: The Personalities and Rivalries That Defined America, a companion book to an upcoming PBS series, argues that in the long run, personality matters more han ideology. A brilliant justice too rigid to win allies has far less impact than a less brilliant one with effective collegial skills and a supple mind, says Rosen, a George Washington University law professor and legal affairs editor of The New Republic. Rosen’s case studies are four rivalries spanning the court’s history, including one non-justice: John Marshall and his distant relative President Thomas Jefferson; Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. and John Marshall Harlan; William O. Douglas and Hugo Black; and William Rehnquist and Antonin Scalia. In each case, Rosen contends, the justices who had the judicial temperament that includes pragmatism, common sense, trust and institutional loyalty Marshall, Harlan, Black and Rehnquist were able to more effectively shape American law. In contrast, the others lived inside their own heads, caring more about abstract ideas than about consensus. Rosen blends biography with clear, accessible descriptions of the sometimes arcane legal cases that illustrate his point. He ends with an interesting recent interview with Roberts, in which the new chief justice seems keenly aware of his predecessors’ successes and failures. He worked for Rehnquist, and sees Marshall as a model. Anne Bartlett is a journalist in Washington, D.C.

<b>A former president’s plan for peace in the Middle East</b> Peace in the Middle East has been an unreachable goal for centuries, confounding a long line of political, military and religious leaders. But if there is a contemporary figure who can offer a credible solution to the crisis, it is former President Jimmy Carter. He was architect of the 1978 Camp David Accords, which brought temporary peace to Israel, Egypt and their neighbors. A year later, terrorists seized nearly 70 American hostages at the U.S. Embassy in Iran, marking the low point of his presidency. Indeed, Carter has an intimate understanding of the Middle East and its complexities. So today, as the violence and rhetoric escalate, he offers timely thoughts on how to restore peace to the region in his latest book, <b>Palestine Peace Not Apartheid</b>.

Carter’s book is instructional for readers with a limited understanding of the Middle East, yet informative for those with a deeper knowledge. It begins with a brief chronology dating to Moses and the Israelites escaping Egypt, underscoring the region’s deep roots of upheaval. The book then quickly jumps to the later half of the 20th century, where Carter relates his personal experiences during his numerous visits to the Middle East and summits with its various leaders.

Turning to the present dilemma in the Middle East, Carter, winner of the 2002 Nobel Peace Prize, boils down the troubling issues to simple terms. He sees the roadblocks to peace being Israel’s reluctance to recognize the borders originally set by the United Nations, and the Palestinians’ reliance on terrorism and suicide bombers. His solution: Israel must be willing to live within its borders; in return, Palestine and its allies must acknowledge the legitimacy of Israel and work to guarantee its security.

The alternative, Carter concludes, is continuation of the current environment, where enemies exist in the same space, segregated by race and religion in short, a system of apartheid.

It will be a tragedy for the Israelis, the Palestinians, and the world, Carter writes, if peace is rejected and a system of oppression, apartheid, and sustained violence is permitted to prevail. <i>John T. Slania is a journalism professor at Loyola University in Chicago.</i>

Can beauty be found in rubble? The answer is yes if you are street photographer Joel Meyerowitz. Meyerowitz wormed his way past hostile border police and fire chiefs to document, on a nearly daily basis, the Ground Zero cleanup after the World Trade Center attacks. In Aftermath, Meyerowitz not only documents the arduous task of removing dangerous rubble from the site, he also honors the grindingly difficult work of the crews who steadily labored at the task though they were often emotionally overcome in the process. Among Meyerowitz’s photographs is one of Pia Hoffman, a crane operator who insisted that all recovered bodies be treated with the same honor and ceremony awarded to police and fire department personnel. When the body of a civilian woman was uncovered, Hoffman lowered her crane’s claw over the victim until officials agreed that she would be removed under a U.S. flag, accompanied by an honor guard. While our consciousness is permanently engraved with select network media images of 9/11 falling towers and sobbing family members the intense security surrounding Ground Zero during its cleanup has, for the most part, prevented the public from seeing other, grittier images such as the slurry wall underlying the trade centers, bent and flayed construction beams, and the workers who participated in cleanup. Meyerowitz’s nine-month photo journal may be the only detailed photo archive of the damage aftermath. As such, his Aftermath, a large-format photography book, with four-page pull-out panoramic photos, exists as an important historical artifact as well as an emotional journey back to the terrorist attacks of 2001.

<p>&lt;b&gt;Boomers aren’t finished yet&lt;/b&gt; To AARP CEO Bill Novelli, the plus sign in his new book, 50+: Igniting a Revolution to Reinvent America, represents not only the second half of life, but also the process of rethinking how to spend it. Although a baby boomer turns 50 every 7.5 seconds and two-thirds of all people who ever reached age 65 are still alive today, Novelli believes that society has not kept up with this huge demographic shift. His inspirational yet down-to-earth book is a call to action for social change so that boomers and generations to come will enjoy both increased longevity and quality of life.<br />
<br />
Novelli devotes each chapter to an opportunity, or area of change. These opportunities include transforming health care, reinventing retirement, revolutionizing the workplace, building livable communities, changing the marketplace, advocating for a cause and leaving a legacy. In each section, Novelli gives a brief history of the topic and real-life examples. According to Novelli, boomers and their elders control approximately 70 percent of the country’s wealth, which means that marketers, employers and politicians should find opportunities along with them. He dispels numerous myths individuals completely stop working once they retire, older consumers are reluctant to part with their money while giving examples of companies at the forefront of hiring mature employees and the benefits they’ve reaped. 50+ suggests that the best legacy boomers can leave the nation is changing the way society thinks about aging. &lt;i&gt;Angela Leeper is an educational consultant and writer in Wake Forest, North Carolina.&lt;/i&gt; </p>

From our archives: Remembering 9/11/2001
The 9/11 terrorists did not discriminate based on race, creed, gender or social standing. The victims came from all walks of life. This reality is reflected in the photographs from that day: the horrors of the destruction and the human toll were captured on both film and digital images. Author David Friend is equally egalitarian in his selection of photographs, and the stories of the people who shot the images, in his captivating book, Watching the World Change: The Stories Behind the Images of 9/11.

Friend, a veteran photographer and Vanity Fair’s editor of creative development, chronicles the events of September 11 and its aftermath through the eyes and camera lenses of both professional and amateur photographers. The photos in the book are gripping. Equally compelling are the tales behind them. For example, there is the account of a gallery owner who laced up his Rollerblades and used a $200 camcorder to shoot footage of the smoking World Trade Center towers. A computer programmer fastened a video camera to his bicycle handlebars, aimed it behind him and recorded scenes of one tower collapsing as he sped away. A commuter shot video through the windows of a subway train as it rumbled across the Manhattan Bridge.

Some of the stories and images are more personal. There is the seasoned photojournalist who shot pictures from her powerboat, praying all the while because the scene was more disturbing than the armed conflicts she covered in Bosnia and South Africa. Or the artist who stood on her roof and shot a portrait of the placid face of her neighbor’s 16-month-old son, with the damaged towers serving as a backdrop.

There have been millions of words written about the tragedy of September 11, but Friend makes a strong argument that the images tell the real story. Photographs, that September and thereafter, Friend writes, have helped to shape our understanding of the week’s events, and have helped us mourn, connect, communicate and respond. There were many heroes the victims, their families, the rescuers. Friend makes a convincing case that the photographers were also heroes in their own way. They risked, and in some cases lost, their lives, to preserve history. There were thousands among us, Friend writers, who had the poise and wherewithal to pick up a camera so that the world might witness and respond.

John T. Slania is a journalism professor at Loyola University in Chicago.