J. Malcolm Garcia Bücher

They bear labels instead of names—noncombatant, unintended victim, collateral damage. Theirs are the blurred faces and forms seen in news footage shot from a moving vehicle. And when soldiers, media, and profiteers move on to the next conflict, they stay behind to cope amid the wreckage. They have stories to tell to anyone who will pause long enough to hear them.In What Wars Leave Behind , J. Malcolm Garcia reveals the people and pain behind the statistics. He writes about impoverished families scraping by in Cairo’s city of the dead, ordinary Syrians pretending all is well as shells explode around them, and others caught in conflicts that rage long after the cameramen have packed up and gone away.Garcia describes his travels in some of the world’s hotspots in Central Asia, the Middle East, and Africa. In a series of personal travel essays that read like short stories, he exposes the endless messiness of war and the failings of good intentions, and he traces their impact on the lives of natives in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Egypt, Kosovo, Chad, and Syria. He discovers amazing resilience among people who must struggle just to survive each day.Garcia gives readers the sort of gritty detail learned from immersing himself in other cultures. He eats the food, drinks the tea, and endures the oppressive heat. These are the stories of how a middle-class guy from the Midwest with a social work degree learned to experience and embrace the cultures of Third World countries in conflict—and lived to tell the tale.

Focusing on the struggles of individuals escaping violence in Honduras and the challenges faced by Mexican reporters covering gang conflicts, this book presents a poignant examination of resilience and the human spirit. Through diverse voices, it highlights the lives of families surviving on the fringes, emphasizing their courage and the vital need for connection amidst the harsh realities of life in Mexico and Central America. The narrative is shaped by themes of grief and anger, offering a sensitive portrayal of those enduring uncommon adversity.

"Collection of literary reportage from Afghanistan: stories that go unreported, the lives of people not usually considered newsworthy or important, people who struggle just to survive"

A debut novel from the award-winning journalist about the people in a San Francisco homeless shelter, and those who try to help—or prey on them."J. Malcolm Garcia has channeled the empathetic ear of Studs Terkel and the investigative skills of the best literary journalists...These stories will remain in the heart and mind’s eye forever." —Beth Taylor, author of The Plain Language of Love and Loss"An exceptionally powerful voice on behalf of the people about whom he writes." —Pulitzer Prize–winning author Dale Maharidge on Garcia's What Wars Leave BehindOut of the Rain takes us into the growing world of the homeless in the United States, particularly in San Francisco. Here we read their powerful stories, which examine not just poverty but bottom-of-the-barrel destitution, and in many cases self-destruction.Tom, who runs a social services agency, doesn’t play by a book of rules as much as try to bring some humanity to his work. Then there is Walter, a homeless man who can’t save himself from booze but is ready to help others. Throughout this novel told from various perspectives, the reader is introduced in intimate detail to the lives of social services workers trying to find open shelter beds and simultaneously navigating federal programs. Homeless men and women are battling sobriety and addiction and simply trying to find sustainable work and decent housing.Based on the author’s experience working with homeless people in San Francisco as a social services worker in the 1980s and 1990s, this novel vividly takes the reader into the heads of combat veterans, junkies, prostitutes and the unemployed. J. Malcolm Garcia left social services to pursue journalism so he could write about the people he worked with and share their stories—and humanity—with the broader public.“There weren’t enough shelter beds, weren’t enough detoxes, weren’t enough jobs, weren’t enough anything for the people I wanted to help.” —Tom, social worker, in Out of the Rain