I intended to read this book years ago now, but I think it still stands up well, even if the details shared about the precise routes migrants use may no longer be relevant. Patrick Kingsley manages to trace several journeys of migrants fleeing upheaval in Africa and the Middle East to Europe in 2015, the year the crisis began to make headlines. He interviewed smugglers, politicians, aid workers, and refugees to provide one of the fullest and most nuanced accounts I've encountered of this movement of people. Highly recommended for those who want a deeper understanding of how and why so many people left their homes and fled to Europe in the past few years. ( )

The body of a 3-year-old washes ashore in Turkey. Seventy-one bodies are left to decompose in an abandoned truck in Austria. These are truly disturbing images that force one to consider the catastrophic consequences of the world’s most recent mass migration. In THE NEW ODYSSEY, Patrick Kingsley takes us to the front lines of what he calls the “migrant trail” to examine this monumental tragedy up close while occasionally pulling back to provide a clearer understanding of the scale of the catastrophe. Yet the personal stories give his book its lasting impact. Many of the people Kingsley interviewed are indeed heroic figures, but others are the most despicable of villains. These stories not only reveal the people involved but also their motivations and methods. On one hand, he migrants see themselves as having no choice (“There we know we will die. If we make it, there is at least hope.”). On the other, there do not seem to be any limits to the smugglers’ greed, nor does the fear mongering evoked by shortsighted politicians seem to have any restraints.

Kingsley emphasizes that the current approach to the crisis is not working and probably will never work. “Their desperation will ultimately prove stronger than our isolation.” He claims that the policies of denial and blockade are based on the foolish assumption that desperate people will stop seeking safety if you just make it hard enough for them to achieve it. This ignores the underlying realities at play: war, terrorism, unrelenting poverty, despotism, and even slavery. Kingsley offers the only reasonable alternative: adopt policies to manage the flow. He further argues that adopting distinctions between “economic migrants” and “refugees” is facile and useless for managing the crisis. He maintains that the crisis is “caused largely by our response to the refugees, rather than by the refugees themselves” and buttresses his argument by citing population data indicating that Europe and America have more than enough capacity to easily absorb these refugees.

His narrative follows the main routes into Europe, beginning in places like Niger and Eritrea. From there migrants flee despotism, war and poverty by first traversing the Sahara, a barrier the refugees call the “second sea.” This trek is strangely reminiscent of that of the Mexicans in North America, characterized by insufficient food, water, and smugglers who care for little else than the migrants’ money. The story then moves to the waterfronts of Libya and Egypt were the migrants are warehoused under inhumane conditions and tortured until leaky and overcrowded vessels can take them, at great financial cost, on dangerous journeys across the Mediterranean to Italy. Many of the smugglers are themselves refugees, but greed seems to dampen any sense of kinship. Kingsley notes that “If they (the smugglers) weren’t dispatching the boats, they’d be on the decks themselves.” The book then moves to the western route across Turkey to Greece, following a desperate walk through the Western Balkans with its multiple closed borders.

Kingsley personalizes his story by adding profiles of migrants, smugglers and people who provide assistance. If this book has a protagonist, it would be the Syrian refugee, Hashem al-Souki. Kingsley refers to him as an “every man.” As a successful civil servant with a wife and three sons, Hashem was imprisoned and tortured by Assad’s police. This experience motivated him to flee to Egypt, were authorities once again assaulted him. Following failed attempts to cross to Italy with his family, he decides to attempt to make it to Sweden alone. Although eventually successful, his family still waits in Egypt.

Abu Hamada runs a smuggling operation in Egypt. He lives like a wealthy man running a remarkably complex business, involving Facebook marketing, purchasing decrepit fishing boats that one could afford to lose if they are either seized or sink, maximizing profits by charging inordinate fees and cutting costs at the expense of safety, bribing corrupt officials to look the other way, providing meager shelter for the migrants that is anything but safe or comfortable, and jamming inconceivable numbers of people onto each boat.

There is no shortage of heroes or villains in this book. The heroes include coastguard crews and a merchant ship chartered by Médecins Sans Frontières who rescue migrants from certain drowning, hotel owners who provide shelter in the Balkans, an Austrian Jew—his family fled the Nazis in WWII—who drives migrants through Hungary, and volunteers on the Greek island of Lesbos who provide food, water shelter and transportation after migrants wash ashore from nearby Turkey. On the other hand, the villains include border guards who harass and deny entry to the migrants, and politicians who see their duty as closing borders and erecting totally ineffective fences. Clearly the latter resonates for Americans today.

Reading this book is indeed harrowing. The writing is crisp and clear giving one an appreciation of the magnitude of the crisis and a clear-eyed, sober assessment of the inadequacy of the measures thus far employed. One can’t help but agree with Kingsley’s conclusion. “It just reminded me of how privileged I've been in my life and how privileged many of us who live in North America or in Europe are compared to people who are actually very similar to us but have drawn the short straw in the lottery where they were born.” ( )