Inspiring Book – The City of Thorns

Isha traveled from Mogadishu, Somalia with her children to the Dadaab Refugee Camp in northern Kenya during the 2011 famine. Her children had all survived the journey, but barely. Malnourished, exhausted, and afraid, she stood in line to register at the largest refugee camp in the world. “This was the moment of encounter. The meeting point between the 2 contradictory arcs of the 21st century: the rule of law that had spawned the international humanitarian system and its other legacy, the chaos unleashed by the end of the colonial project to subjugfate and carve up the globe.”

Ben Rawlence in The City of Thorns interweaves the stories of 9 individuals to show what life is like in the Dadaab Refugee Camp and stories of the wider political forces that keep the refugees trapped there. [NY: Picador, 2016]