Bookshelf
Alumni and faculty members who would like to have their books considered for this listing should contact Stacey Himmelberger, editor of Hamilton magazine. This list, which dates back to 2018, is updated periodically with books appearing alphabetically on the date of entry.
City of Refugees: The Story of Three Newcomers Who Breathed Life into a Dying American Town by Susan Hartman K’74
July 1, 2022
Tags Alumni Book Kirkland College Alumna
(Boston: Beacon Press, 2022).
Meet Sadia, a bright, spirited Somali Bantu teenager who rebels against her formidable mother; Ali, an Iraqi translator who creates a home with a divorced American woman but is still traumatized by war; and Mersiha, a hard-working Bosnian who dreams of opening a café.
All three are newcomers to the United States, and Hartman follows them for eight years as they and their families adjust to life in Utica, N.Y., a city revived by the influx of refugees from Vietnam, Bosnia, Burma, Somalia, Iraq, and elsewhere. These immigrants have transformed the struggling area over the past four decades — opening small businesses and fixing up abandoned houses. “Other Rust Belt cities have also welcomed refugees, hoping to jump-start their economies and attract a younger population,” the publisher notes. “City of Refugees is a complex and poignant story of a small city but also of America — a country whose promise of safe harbor and opportunity is knotty and incomplete, but undeniably alive.”
The author is a journalist whose work has appeared in The New York Times, Christian Science Monitor, and Newsday. She notes about the book project: “My editor at Beacon Press turned out to be a recent Hamilton graduate, Haley Lynch [’17]. And she is brilliant! The book actually opens with [Professor of Economics] Erol Balkan, who guided me into this project; my time at Kirkland is also part of the intro. So, it’s a bit of a family affair.”
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Stacey Himmelberger
Editor of Hamilton magazine
