Here Among Strangers

The characters in Sarah Crawford’s Here Among Strangers struggle to integrate the developing world experience with their prior or future lives; so much so, in fact, that their very sanity becomes, at times, a question. Who is more sane, we wonder, the narrator of ’My Brother’s House’ who spends years homeless and wild in India, or her brother who leads a duck home from a city park; the hoarding mother in ’Chinatown,’ or the daughter who owns nothing and finds comfort in deprivation? The marvelous cast of long-term developing world travelers gives us a hard look at the differential between our lives and life as it is for much of the rest of the world, and an exquisitely crafted look at ourselves. These stories are alight with emotional integrity, honesty, and compassion, and should be required reading for Americans going abroad and for every member of the U.S. State Department.