Outcasts United: A Refugee Team, an American Town [Hardcover]

This is the fascinating story of a well educated Jordanian young lady Luma Mufleh who when completing her university in America refused to return home and drifted to Clarkston,Georgia a town that had been designated a resettlement centre.
From a meagre start she formed 3 football teams(under 13,15 and 17)called the Fugees.Team members were mainly from Africa and the Middle East.Her great successes and a few failures are well documented by the author-a New York Times journalist.
The YMCA and particularly the mayor of Clarkston emerge with their reputations badly damaged.
A must read.

A good book, in my opinion well told. Short chapters and the flicking between comments on football, then on family backgrounds do make the book feel episodic, but not in a way which separates you from the narrative or gets in the way of the book's aim. The refugee's lives are episodic anyway, as is football itself - if you play the game yourself, you'll know that it is all about anticipation of matchday, and then the anticlimax of whatever 'real' life is for a week. So the book's structure to me,fits in well.
It's a good story after all, and a genuinely uplifting tale. The only criticism for me is that the book states that it doesn't want to present coach Luma as a saint / hero figure - but perhaps it does stray too far towards this. If you watch Luma in interviews she is very humble and down to earth, and the rapport she has with the refugees is clearly overwhelmingly supportive, not really sentimental at all.
Maybe this is the difference between an American writer and a European; one only hopes that if the Fugee's story does get to Hollywood, it isn't mawkishly over-sentimentalised and is filmed in an acceptably gritty and realistic way. As for the book though, enjoy it as a tale of human life and optimism, or an essay on urban America, rather than a book about sport - and enjoy.

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.