HOME IS IN THE DETAILS

Following on the heels of the highly acclaimed We Crossed A Bridge and It Trembled, Home Is The Details weaves engrossing oral history with scholarship and analysis to interrogate the meaning of home. For this project, Pearlman interviewed 450 refugees displaced from Syria and scattered around the globe, belonging to the largest national group among the unprecedented 80 million refugees on our planet today. With Home Is The Details Pearlman has crafted a book that blends big ideas and intimate storytelling to build an entirely new concept of home, proposing that it is the convergence of five elements: security, fulfillment, place, love and belonging. These elements effortlessly fuse for those of us who are rooted, in geographer Yi-Fu's sense of being “unreflectively secure and comfortable in a particular locality.” Uprooted by war or persecution and cast into the unknown, displaced people do not have this luxury. Their stories reveal in poignant depth what it means when the five elements of home disconnect and must be stitched together anew. The result is a stunning mosaic of profoundly moving narratives that render with startling immediacy the universal quest for home.
Too often, refugees are portrayed in the media via simplistic tropes; rarely do we hear the voices of refugees themselves. Home Is The Details does the latter, but also goes further and challenges us to embrace what refugees can teach us about our own lives. A bold break with growing anti-refugee sentiment around the world and an important book that deserves a place on the shelf next to such classics as Svetlana Alexievich's Voices From Chernobyl and The Warmth of Other Suns by Isabel Wilkerson, Home Is The Details will forever change the way its readers think about home.
Wendy Pearlman is the Charles Deering McCormick Professor of Teaching Excellence, Professor of Political Science at Northwestern University. She holds a BA from Brown University, an MA from Georgetown, and a Ph.D. from Harvard. She is the author of four successful books including We Crossed A Bridge and It Trembled: Voices from Syria (Custom House, 2017)which was longlisted for the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence and featured as "essential reading" on the cover of the New York Times Book Review.