Product Description

The extraordinary story of a refugee football team and the transformation of a small American town. Clarkston, Georgia, was a typical Southern town until it was designated a refugee settlement centre in the 1990s, becoming home to scores of families in flight from the world's war zones - from Liberia and Sudan to Iraq and Afghanistan. Suddenly Clarkston's streets were filled with women wearing the hijab, the smells of cumin and curry, and kids of all colours playing football in any open space they could find. Among them was Luma Mufleh, a Jordanian woman who founded a youth football team to unify Clarkston's refugee children and keep them off the streets. These kids named themselves the Fugees. Outcasts United follows a pivotal season in the life of the Fugees and their charismatic coach. Warren St. John documents the lives of a diverse group of young people as they miraculously coalesce into a band of brothers, while also drawing a fascinating portrait of a fading American town struggling to accommodate its new arrivals. At the centre of the story is fiery Coach Luma, who relentlessly drives her players to success on the football field while holding together their lives - and the lives of their families - in the face of a series of daunting challenges. This fast-paced chronicle of a single season is a complex and inspiring tale of a small town becoming a global community - and an account of the ingenious and complicated ways we create a home in a changing world.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #291293 in Books
• Published on: 2009-05-28
• Original language: English
• Binding: Hardcover
• 320 pages

Review
"A brilliant and empathetic depiction of our common quest for meaning and happiness. Warren St. John invites us into the lives of a community of refugees, their bewildered neighbors in a small town, and a Jordanian woman who not only coaches but also mentors, mothers, and inspires some remarkable boys, to create a heartwarming tale about the transformations that occur when our disparate lives connect." Ishmael Beah "Truly unforgettable, Outcasts United offers a stirring lesson in the power of a single person to transform the lives of many. It's an incisive window into the world ahead for all of us, where cultural diversity won't be an ideal or a course requirement or a corporate initiative but a fact of life that has to be wrestled with and reconciled, if never quite resolved." Reza Aslan

About the Author
Born in Birmingham, Alabama, Warren St. John is currently a reporter for the New York Times. He has also written extensively for The New Yorker, the New York Observer, and Wired. He went to Columbia University and lives in New York.

Customer Reviews

Compelling Story -- Poorly Told
Since I tend to read most books about soccer that I happen to hear about, this much buzzed-about book eventually made it to the top of my pile. Even then I shied away from it for a while, since I'm leery of books that are described as "inspirational." Nonetheless, I eventually cracked the spine, and discovered that it's that rare breed of book that's both fascinating and frustrating. Fascinating because it actually is kind of inspirational and will open the reader's eye to the daunting financial and social issues faced by refugees in the United States. Frustrating because it is neither well constructed nor well written.

The book revolves around the determined efforts of a young Jordanian immigrant woman to build a youth soccer club in a small town about fifteen miles outside of Atlanta. The twist is that her club is comprised of kids (or rather, boys) from the town's large refugee population of Liberians, Albanians, Afghans, etc. This allows the author to explore the many financial and social problems refugees face in trying to resettle in the United States, as well as the interesting effects of such demographic change in some of the areas where aid agencies place them. St. John does a reasonably good journalistic job of tracing the woman's backstory and detailing her efforts to establish the club, and the various administrative and cultural roadblocks she had to overcome.

This story originally appeared as a series of articles in the New York Times, and I'm guessing it was actually better in that shorter format. Here, the clunky writing becomes glaringly obvious, as does his inability to write well about the game of soccer. The book has more redundancies and restatements of information than any I can recall reading in the last several years -- both in the general narrative, but especially when he tries to write about the boys' games. The overall effect is rather like a mediocre high school paper, in which the student is trying desperately to pad his material to meet a ten-page requirement by saying the same thing over and over with only minor variations in word choice.

Don't get me wrong, there's plenty of compelling material -- especially the struggle to find a field to play on, the various bureaucratic roadblocks thrown up by xenophobic "old-timers," and the fragile psyches of the boys themselves. Unfortunately, these are undermined by the book's significant narrative problems, as the author skips around quite a bit, diving in and out of the lives of his subjects, never settling long enough on any one to provide any focus. Even his ostensible protagonist, the coach, is left fairly unexplored and unchallenged. Overall, I guess it's worth checking out if you're interested in either refugee issues, immigration, or soccer -- just don't come to it with huge expectations.

A curiosity

This is an interesting book describing how one of, possibly, the most determined women in the world crafted a successful football team from very diffeent failies of refugees. This gave them self-pride, purpose, motivation, medals etc and helped them to avoid some of the potential pitfalls of close living in poverty.
Its readable rather than gripping, but worth reading.

Plenty Of Expectation But Fails To Reach Potential
i bought this book on the strength of a review in a quality sunday paper.I was excited by the subject and theme.The story is inspirational,an outsider motivated by a dream unites a group of refugee children using the power of football to engage and promote values and aspirations against the odds.The book explores the impact of globilisation and the journey's of the families explaining how this process causes changes for all, even the established community of Clarkston a southern American town meaning "as the world becomes globilized,we'ii all be searching for home".However the voice of the children is not central to the narrative rather the view of Luma the charismatic coach dominates.This means there is very little analysis of her somewhat unscientific coaching and motivational techniques.The role sport can play in promoting fun ,friendship ,inclusion,equality and excellence is not adequately described.What about the children not good enough to make the team? Why is winning so important?These and other questions need answering given the wider all embracing vision set out at the beginning of the book.An exploration using the voice of the children may have provided more answers and provided a model that could be applied to other settings.A missed opportunity!