Search results for ""Author Charlotte McDonald-Gibson""

Riot police are shutting down borders, 800 lives are lost in a single shipwreck, a boy's body washes up on a beach: this is the European Union in summer 2015. But how did a bloc founded upon the values of human rights and dignity for all reach this point? And what was driving millions of desperate people to risk their lives on the Mediterranean? Charlotte McDonald-Gibson has spent years reporting on every aspect of Europe's refugee crisis, and Cast Away offers a vivid glimpse of the personal dilemmas, pressures, choices and hopes that lie beneath the headlines. We meet Majid, a Nigerian boy who exchanges the violence of his homeland for Libya, only to be driven onto a rickety boat during Colonel Gaddafi's crackdown on migrants. Nart is an idealistic young lawyer who risks imprisonment and torture in Syria until it is no longer safe for him to stay. Sina has to leave her new husband behind and take their unborn son across three continents to try and escape the Eritrean dictatorship. Mohammed is a teenager who dreams of becoming the world's best electrician until he is called to serve as a foot-soldier in the Syrian army. And Hanan watches in horror as the safe life she built for her four children in Damascus collapses, and she has to entrust their lives to people smugglers. While the politicians wrangle over responsibility, and the media talk in statistics, Cast Away brings to life the human consequences of the most urgent humanitarian issue of our time.

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Longlisted for the Andrew Carnegie Medals for Excellence 2017 “Galvanizing and deeply compassionate.”—O Magazine From Time magazine’s European Union correspondent, a powerful exploration of the refugee crisis in the Mediterranean, told through the stories of migrants who have made the perilous journey into Europe In 2015, more than one million migrants and refugees, most fleeing war-torn countries in Africa and the Middle East, attempted to make the perilous journey into Europe. Around three thousand lost their lives as they crossed the Mediterranean and Aegean in rickety boats provided by unscrupulous traffickers, including over seven hundred men, women, and children in a single day in April 2015. In one of the first works of narrative nonfiction on the ongoing refugee crisis and the civil war in Syria, Cast Away describes the agonizing stories and the impossible decisions that migrants have to make as they head toward what they believe is a better life: a pregnant Eritrean woman, four days overdue, chooses to board an obviously unsafe smuggler’s ship to Greece; a father, swimming from a sinking ship, has to decide whether to hold on to one child or let him go to save another. Veteran journalist Charlotte McDonald-Gibson offers a vivid, on-the-ground glimpse of the pressures and hopes that drive individuals to risk their lives. Recalling the work of Katherine Boo and Caroline Moorehead, Cast Away brings to life the human consequences of one of the most urgent humanitarian issues of our time.

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A powerful investigation into the world of extremism and redemption, from TIME journalist and author of Cast Away. "Far Out is an excellent mix of investigative journalism, entertaining storytelling and intelligent analysis. Its individual stories are like pieces of a puzzle that McDonald-Gibson assembles to offer deeply human insights into the drivers of radicalisation and extremism" - Julia Eber, author of Going Dark What makes an extremist? From obscure cults to revolutionary movements, people have always been seduced by fringe beliefs. And in today's deeply divided world, more people than ever are drawn to polarising ideologies. All too often we simply condemn those whose positions offend us, instead of trying to understand what draws people to the far edges of society -- and what can pull them back again. In Far Out, we meet eight people from across religious, ideological, and national divides who found themselves drawn to radical beliefs, including a young man who became the face of white supremacy in Trump-era America, a Norwegian woman sucked into a revolutionary conspiracy in the 1980s, a schoolboy who left Britain to fight in Syria, and an Australian from the far-left Antifa movement. By immersing us in their stories, McDonald-Gibson challenges our ideas of who or what an extremist is, and shows us not only what we can do to prevent extremism in the future, but how we can start healing the rifts in our world today.

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A powerful investigation into the world of extremism and redemption, from TIME journalist and author of Cast Away. "Far Out is an excellent mix of investigative journalism, entertaining storytelling and intelligent analysis. Its individual stories are like pieces of a puzzle that McDonald-Gibson assembles to offer deeply human insights into the drivers of radicalisation and extremism" - Julia Eber, author of Going Dark What makes an extremist? From obscure cults to revolutionary movements, people have always been seduced by fringe beliefs. And in today's deeply divided world, more people than ever are drawn to polarising ideologies. All too often we simply condemn those whose positions offend us, instead of trying to understand what draws people to the far edges of society -- and what can pull them back again. In Far Out, we meet eight people from across religious, ideological, and national divides who found themselves drawn to radical beliefs, including a young man who became the face of white supremacy in Trump-era America, a Norwegian woman sucked into a revolutionary conspiracy in the 1980s, a schoolboy who left Britain to fight in Syria, and an Australian from the far-left Antifa movement. By immersing us in their stories, McDonald-Gibson challenges our ideas of who or what an extremist is, and shows us not only what we can do to prevent extremism in the future, but how we can start healing the rifts in our world today.

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