Lost on Earth

the long version

In Lost on Earth: Nomads of the New World, Pulitzer Prize-winning foreign correspondent Mark Fritz leads us into the twilight world of contemporary refugees as they trek across landscapes that are continually being reshaped by the aftershocks of the end of the Cold War. Abstract events around the globe are humanized by people like Herbert Puchwein, a detective from Vienna who rescues a busload of orphans pinned down in Sarajevo, and Senada Suljic, whose family, driven from their Bosnian home, pray that their paths will cross again someday. This is the story of a bored East German girl who slips into a forest one day and finds a magical land on the other side; an engineer from Liberia who watches as his neatly constructed life is dismantled by war; a jaded, wandering nurse from Ohio who drifts from emergency room to emergency room, hooked on adrenaline until overdosing on it in Somalia. And a college student who books the ultimate adventure tour - joining the war to recapture the land that exiled him when he was an infant. Investigating the forces at play in the world, and with compassionate insight into the human will to survive, Fritz shows us where these refugees come from, why they flee, and what they encounter during their journeys.