Warren St. JohnRecensioni

3.5 stars. The story of not just a soccer team of refugees from around the world in America, but also of a small town's reaction to the refugee resettlement.

Outstanding storytelling in this nonfiction book for young readers. Does a great job weaving the life experiences of the boys together with Luma's life. I felt like the incident with Luma's arrest was left unresolved -- did she ever find out why she was pulled over? Was it just profiling? It certainly seemed to be. Altogether an incredibly inspiring story about an individual's ability to make a huge positive change in the world.

This book is fantastic. A great piece of journalism about immigration in America. A great story about young boys growing up. A great exploration about the greatest game on earth (soccer)!

This book documents the lives of a youth soccer team made up of refugees, their female coach, and the southern American town in the process of becoming a resettlement center. Epilogue, Contact Resources.

Eye-opening story dealing with refugee life in America, told primarily by following a youth soccer team in Georgia. By following the soccer games of the boys, we're introduced to the hardships faced by the mix of refugee boys and their families from war torn nations around the world. Many of the boys have lost a father or other family member to war or terror in their former countries, and have to deal with being displaced, learning a new language, adapting to a new culture, often in an inhospitable environment. The volunteer soccer coach, also an immigrant, is an admirable character who overcomes unwelcoming elements of the town and its leaders, as well as her own difficult background to help the boys learn and adapt to their new life in America. Not all the boys succeed, but enough do to keep the book more uplifting than depressing.

Outcasts United, A Refuge Team, an American Town by Warren St. John (pp 300). This imminently readable book is about a Young Jordanian-American woman coach and members of several of her soccer teams comprised of recent immigrants, a polyglot of Iraqis, Burundians, Liberians, Bosnians, Somalis, Afghanis, and others. As newly relocated immigrants, these young kids were dealing with torn apart families, poverty, prejudice, assimilation, cultural differences, language barriers, and more challenges than most of us can even imagine. To a large extent the players and their families were not particularly welcome where they landed in American (outside Atlanta, though it could have been anywhere). However, they persevered, as did the town’s residents who begrudgingly and unevenly accepted them. The author did a good job of withholding judgement about the various supposed bad actors in the story, doing his best to explain different perspectives and reactions to uninvited change that tested the tolerance and understanding of many of the people in the community. Above all the story is inspiring, but it is also aggravating, frustrating, nauseating, and enervating, even across the chasm separating reality and the written word. The coach, Luma Mufleh, is an amazing woman who devoted her life to soccer and young people in desperate need of the sport, friendship, leadership, strict discipline, and structure she offered. Her efforts taxed her, her players, players’ families, the town as a whole, and many of the community’s members. Despite many successes by a variety of measures, there is no wonderful, fulfilling ending. Rather the struggle continues, and this tale underscores the need for all of us to do the extremely hard work of building our own communities, including all residents and constituencies.

Anyone who enjoys college football should consider giving this in-depth case study in fandom a look, even though it's written by and focuses on fans of the Alabama Crimson Tide, a team that I, like so many others, am unable to contemplate without feeling a mixture of disgust and hatred. As a Texas Longhorns fan, I'll never forget the cosmic cruelties of the 2009 BCS Championship Game, and I'll always remember the peculiar sense I felt when the Tide played Big 12 turncoats/SEC newcomers Texas A&M in 2012, nearly unable to decide who to pull for in a can't-they-both-lose spectacle of competing acrimonies.

The author, a journalist for the New York Times, is a lifelong Tide fan who decided to do some research into the nature of fandom, hoping to shed a little light on why millions of otherwise psychologically healthy people devote time, energy, and money to sports. Though the urge to root for sports teams is nearly universal, people have been fascinated with its seeming irrationality for millennia. St. John has a good quote from the ancient Roman author Pliny the Younger about our propensity to cheer for laundry:

"It surprises me all the more that so many thousands of adult men should have such a childish passion for watching galloping horses and drivers standing in chariots, over and over again. If they were attracted by the speed of the horses or the driver's skill one could account for it, but in fact it is the racing-colours they really support and care about, and if the colours were to be exchanged in mid-course during a race, they would transfer their favor and enthusiasm and rapidly desert the famous drivers and horses whose names they shout as they recognize them from afar. Such is the popularity and importance of a worthless shirt."

He conducted field research in the form of following the Tide, in an RV if possible, for the entire 1999 season from the opener against Vanderbilt right up until the SEC championship game against Florida (oddly, he devotes only a single oblique paragraph in the epilogue to the Orange Bowl against Michigan, a heartbreaking loss also notable for being Tom Brady's final college game). The real draw are the characters he encounters along the way, such as:

- a couple who missed their daughter's wedding so they could attend the rivalry game against Tennessee (don't worry, they made the reception afterwards)
- a couple where the wife was having a gall bladder attack, and she desperately got hopped up on Demerol for a bowl game against Ohio State before dealing with her medical issue
- a man who crashed his plane into a tree before the Mississippi State game, yet still made it

These people are really funny to read about, and though as an outsider I read their stories in much the same check-out-this-trainwreck spirit that drives people to watch horrible reality TV shows, by the end I admired the author for doing what I thought impossible - humanizing Bama fans. I freely acknowledge the arbitrariness of sports fandom, yet I still can't resist compulsively refreshing ESPN to get my fix of modern tribalism during football season. If you've ever chuckled knowingly at those Bud Light "it's only weird if it doesn't work" commercials, you should check this out as soon as you've fortified your stomach against the prospect of nearly 300 pages about crimson and white. It's broader than that, and you may find yourself with a deeper appreciation for your (our) shared obsession.

My library director asked me to read this book so I could potentially discuss it's eligibility for a Community Reads book.

I went in skeptical. I like very specific kinds of nonfiction, and I didn't think this was any kind of what I liked. I dragged my feet on reading it too (I checked it out over a month ago, had to renew it).

I shouldn't have worried. A narrative that focuses on a highly independent woman from Jordan who saw a community need and fed it slowly, building up her reputation and building that of her teams.

She saw kids who needed to do something to keep them safe (not just from the world, but from themselves: as is repeatedly mentioned, refugees often suffer from PTSD or other emotional fallout from simply having to leave their home and come to a new place, where they don't always speak the language fluently at first, among other things.). She saw, also, kids who liked to play soccer, but had no formal training. She saw kids who needed a small, manageable habit, that needed friends desperately, who needed leadership, who needed something to do while parents were out working at ungodly hours to keep their kids eating and in a home.

This woman went from one team of varying ages to three in the space of a couple years, and managed to see one of them almost to a regional WIN against teams that had been playing together for about a decade.

This was a vastly satisfying book and I highly recommend it.

"...it is also a story about the challenges facing resettled refugees in this country. More than 900,000 have been admitted to the United States since 1993, and their presence seems to bring out the best in some people and the worst in others." NYTimes article, January 2007

The subtitle is perhaps grander than the story: the soccer team (actually three teams, divided by age) is indeed made up of refugees from all over, who have been resettled in Clarkston, Georgia, but they remain separate from the town's mostly white population, and have to fight even to use town fields. Coach Luma, a Jordanian immigrant herself, is tough on the kids but helps their families. Her expectations for her players are high, and half of every three-hour practice is a tutoring session, with volunteers she finds to help the kids with their English and other subjects.

I read the version "adapted for young people," and there seemed to be a few editing errors and inconsistencies. Told mostly in third person, the use of first person crops up about halfway through, then disappears again until the end, a jarring interruption. One of the families' stories describes a mother grabbing her two youngest sons and fleeing, but at least one of her older sons reappears later, with no explanation. It's a bit unclear how Coach Luma makes a living (though in the article above, it mentions the cleaning company she starts to hire refugee women), and there's no resolution with her family back in Jordan (although that may be that they are still not in communication). A basic understanding of the rules of soccer is expected.

The book was fine, but it doesn't really tackle the issues it raises - particularly the resettlement of refugee families and education of refugee children - nor does it explore the characters' lives in depth (there are, after all, so many characters).

Quotes/notes

For reasons he rarely revealed, he was separated at some point from his parents and taken in by his uncle... (99) - Rarely? Or never? Or just not to the author?

"And if you keep getting beat up on the same road, take a different road." (143) - Luma's advice to the Fugees on avoiding gangs

"It kept our minds from thinking about what happened....We made friends - kids from different cultures. It broadened our minds, and we weren't the only ones going through hard times. That's why the team is so close. It became our family." (Shamsoun, 178)

A few minutes later, Jeremiah added another [goal] with a cannon shot from fifteen yards out. His teammates responded by getting on the ground and kissing his shooting foot. (209)

But there are still challenges....the local public schools continue to fail the refugee population - and American students as well. (222)

"No one person can do everything. But we can all do something." (Tracy Ediger, Fugees' team manager, 226)

Really interesting look into fandom, in particular college football insanity.

There is so much soccer in the book that it becomes tedious if you don't know (or care) about it. I found myself skipping those paragraphs describing game play and just scanning for the score to see if the Fugees won or lost that match. Luma, the coach, is an interesting, if not entirely likable character. I really enjoyed the stories of the players and their families and their reactions and adaptations to life in the U.S. A good editing would have improved the book immensely, I think. The call to social justice is lost in the maze of soccer details.

I should preface this review by saying that I am not a sports fan and not a football fan, and I was not looking forward to reading this book, which was recommended to me. So with all that in mind, no one is more shocked than I am by how much I loved this book.

The book is essentially an Alabamian-turned-New Yorker's experience taking a leave of absence from his job to follow the Alabama Crimson Tide football team in an RV. It is a funny and sometimes surprisingly poignant account of his time at home and away games. He introduces us to the people he met along the way, many of whom start out as comical caricatures and then surprise us with their complexity. Somewhat critical to the story is the fact that, even though the author is from Alabama and grew up following the Tide, he is almost universally viewed as an outsider because he lives in New York and introduces himself as a reporter, which affects many of his interactions.

If you do not like reading accounts of sporting events with mind-numbing detail about fumbles and touchdowns and interceptions (I do not), you will actually be OK with this book. The discussion of what actually happened in the games was limited to a few pages at most per game, and for the most part, you can skip ahead to find out whether the team won or lost without missing anything. The book is about southern football culture (which is basically a religion), and the games themselves are not actually all that relevant to the broader story.

A couple of things I do feel inclined to mention. First, the author can be a little bit sexist, occasionally expressing shock when good-looking college women are drunk or screaming profanities at the games. He is young enough to know that being obnoxious is not the exclusive provenance of 20-something frat boys, and I found these passages annoying.

Also, the author does occasionally touch on issues of racism among the fans, and while the book is obviously meant to be a mostly lighthearted account of his experience, he could've broached this subject with a little more introspection. He does talk about the incongruous logic of the racist fan, but he doesn't ever really touch on the exploitative nature of college sports or the deeply entrenched racism at some of the institutions featured in this book. I don't think this type of book demands an in-depth study of the issue, but I felt distinctly as though the author was intentionally giving a very big issue only the most perfunctory mention.

This story takes place in a small town in Georgia. Conflict was and still is rampant around the world, where families lived in constant fear. This mismatched soccer team name eventually evolves to being called, The Fugees. The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR)
selected families to relocate to the United States The Fugues came from Congo, Burundi, Sudan, Liberia, Bosnia, Afghanistan and Iraq, among other countries. They are boys whose families were selected by the UNHCR for resettlement in a small town outside Atlanta called Clarkston. Most arrived with nothing but the clothes on their backs and already in debt – owing thousands of dollars to a government agency for the cost of their one-way plane tickets to America. Once in the U.S., resettled refugees are given just three months of assistance from the government before they’re on their own, left to do the best they can to build new lives in a strange land.

This kind of transition would be difficult for anyone, but children and teenagers face special challenges. They are caught between worlds – no longer of the countries in which they were born, yet still separate and outside from the culture of their new home. They are outsiders at school, and at the same time, come under pressure from parents who see efforts to act or dress “American” as a repudiation of their native culture. Outside of school and their homes, the boys must also contend with pressure from the local street gangs who don’t hesitate to take advantage of the newcomers’ desire to belong.

A remarkable woman who emigrated from Jordan named Luma has a burden for these boys and their families. And even though she is a "girl" she knows how to coach and can certainly play soccer. She organizes a team for these diverse boys, battling language barriers, lack of funding and racial discrimination. After all, how can families afford to buy soccer shoes when they don't even have money to put food on the table. At times, the book frustrated me as Luma and The Fugees, experience such hardships, failure and disappointment. I wanted everything to go smoothly for them, but this is not a work of fiction and problems abound. But Luma somehow had the personality and heart to perservere. She does not view herself as remarkable, but she made a difference in the lives of many people who would have simply been lost in the system. Luma is still doing so today.

The small Georgia town of Clarkston, outside Atlanta, went from being a small smouthern town to being a major spot for resettled refugees. From many countries. The population grew, the schools were faced with many students who didn't speak English, the refugees were settled into apartment blocks already inhabited by poor Americans and gang members. And the white old-timers were not all happy. At all.

As these changes were occurring, a Jordanian immigrant and soccer coach (who came to the US to attend college, not as a refugee), drove through one day and was shocked at the population she saw walking around town and playing soccer. After some research, she decided to start a free soccer program for kid.

This book chronicles the journey--the frustrating encounters with the mayor and town council, the sponsorship and promises from the nearby YMCA, the problems of dealing with troubled/frightened/overwhelmed kids and scared/exhausted parents, and the successes (big and small).

The story gives the reader some insight to an immigrant's struggle to settle in a new country and culture.

The underdog sports story is predictable. What drew me, a non sports enthusiast, to this book was the discussion on refugee communities. We, as a nation, need to do a better job when it comes to asylum seekers. When these people from war-torn nations, are chosen to be brought to the US, dumping them in rural Georgia is not a good resettlement plan. This book does a great job of pointing out exactly why that particular state department strategy is failing.

This was an educational story about the experiences of refugees (especially children) in the United States.

I love any book that has to do with refugees and refugee resettlement and when you add a feel good, against-all-odds sports story, you know it's going to be a winner. Add some good musical background and there wouldn't be a dry eye in the house.

This book told the story of a soccer team of refugees from all over the world and the struggles they faced in order to become a team. The parts I found the most interesting were in the dynamic between the refugees and the people of the small town of Clarkston, GA (just outside Atlanta) who all of the sudden were met with large numbers of refugees being resettled in their community. I'd heard a little about the resettlement program in Clarkston, because they do resettle so many refugees there, so I really enjoyed the in depth look into how resettlement works in Clarkston. I really liked getting to know the kids on the team and their backgrounds and to see them all come together throughout the book. While the coach of the team had a completely different way of doing things than I would (super competitive, verging on mean, my way or the highway type person) I still really liked her and respected how much she did for the team and the refugees.

I love any book that has to do with refugees and refugee resettlement and when you add a feel good, against-all-odds sports story, you know it's going to be a winner. Add some good musical background and there wouldn't be a dry eye in the house.

This book told the story of a soccer team of refugees from all over the world and the struggles they faced in order to become a team. The parts I found the most interesting were in the dynamic between the refugees and the people of the small town of Clarkston, GA (just outside Atlanta) who all of the sudden were met with large numbers of refugees being resettled in their community. I'd heard a little about the resettlement program in Clarkston, because they do resettle so many refugees there, so I really enjoyed the in depth look into how resettlement works in Clarkston. I really liked getting to know the kids on the team and their backgrounds and to see them all come together throughout the book. While the coach of the team had a completely different way of doing things than I would (super competitive, verging on mean, my way or the highway type person) I still really liked her and respected how much she did for the team and the refugees.

I love any book that has to do with refugees and refugee resettlement and when you add a feel good, against-all-odds sports story, you know it's going to be a winner. Add some good musical background and there wouldn't be a dry eye in the house.

This book told the story of a soccer team of refugees from all over the world and the struggles they faced in order to become a team. The parts I found the most interesting were in the dynamic between the refugees and the people of the small town of Clarkston, GA (just outside Atlanta) who all of the sudden were met with large numbers of refugees being resettled in their community. I'd heard a little about the resettlement program in Clarkston, because they do resettle so many refugees there, so I really enjoyed the in depth look into how resettlement works in Clarkston. I really liked getting to know the kids on the team and their backgrounds and to see them all come together throughout the book. While the coach of the team had a completely different way of doing things than I would (super competitive, verging on mean, my way or the highway type person) I still really liked her and respected how much she did for the team and the refugees.

Hsrd to put down true story of refugees living in a Georgia town outside of Atlanta who come together to play soccer. But that is not really an adequate description of the book. It is about differences being overcome. It is about trust and friendship. It is about the overwhelming struggles of refugees and what they have experienced before being "resettled," and the continual struggles they experience in a country and culture that is so different from their own. It is really about too many things to mention. "Heartwarming" is a word overused in describing books and stories, but I found myself smiling many times while reading this saga. Outcomes were not always what was expected, but that is what makes this a true story and not fiction!

I really enjoyed this book. It tells the story of a soccer team made up of refugees living in Clarkston, Georgia. The author struck a good balance of telling what was going on with the soccer team, giving general background information about refugee resettlement, and providing specifics about the reaction to resettlement in Clarkston. I really grew to love a lot of the boys on the team. Overall, it's a good read.

I decided to read this book because it was picked by the collage my granddaughter is attending in the fall as the book all freshman need to read before Freshman Week and I wanted to see what they had chosen.

The book is about a small town outside of Atlanta, Georgia where many refugees were resettled by the UN after they had escaped from wars and dictators and made their way to refugee camps. They came from many countries - Afghanistan, the Congo, Somalia, the Sudan, Serbia - and many spoke little or no English. Many were without fathers because they had been killed or jailed. That's one side of the story.

The other side is about a Jordanian girl who was relatively well-off in Jordan and came to the US to attend college in NY. After college she decided to stay in America which infuriated her father and he cut off all ties to her. Eventually she ends up in the same town in Georgia. She decides to start a youth soccer league when she sees many of the youths playing in the parking lots of the apartment buildings where they are housed.

I think this book melds a lot of ideas and circumstances that will provide lots of discussion - how an old, Southern, basically white town reacts to the refugees and the prejudices they show is a big part of the book. But also how the families live and the importance they place on family. How hard it is for the refugee families to make a living and how some employers take advantage of the fact that they don't often speak much English.

The author started to research this book for a series of articles in the NY Times and I always view such books with some skepticism. Frequently the book is just a newspaper article stretched out. But I thought this author did a good job and the background he provided was good for the story and not just added words.

Such an incredible book. This book shows that despite ethnic, cultural, religious, etc. difference it is possible to come together and create something amazing. I hope to start dance outreach programs in schools, so this book was perfect for me... I was able to see how one woman made something out of what looked like nothing to many. I would recommend this book to fellow teachers or hopeful teachers because it serves as a reminder of how much of an impact we have, and our ability to make a difference.

Just a few miles from Atlanta, the city of Clarkston became a settlement for families of refugees from war-torn countries. Soccer coach Luma Mufleh formed the Fugees, a soccer team consisting of boys from various countries and backgrounds. This inspiring book explores the array of challenges the team faced on and off the field and how determination prevailed.