WALLS : Travels Along the Barricades

"Marcello Di Cintio is one of the best travel writers of his generation. In Walls, he tells compelling and engrossing stories with his customary mix of vivid detail, a strong sense of history, a lovely sense of humour and, above all, a fascination with the human race in all its contradictions." –Margaret MacMillan, bestselling author of Dangerous Games, Nixon and Mao, and Paris 1919 and Warden of St Antony's College, Oxford University Winner of the 2013 City of Calgary W. O. Mitchell Book Prize Winner of the 2013 Wilfred Eggleston Prize for Non-Fiction The world's walls are supposed to be coming down. We speak of globalization, international markets and global villages. Barriers to trade keep falling, and it is now possible to communicate instantly from nearly anywhere in the world. But just as these virtual walls come down, real walls rise. Economics and electronics may link us, but we are increasingly divided by bricks, barbed wire and steel. Marcello Di Cintio brings us to the world's most disputed edges to meet those who live alongside the razor wire. Di Cintio has shared tea with Saharan refugees on the wrong side of Morocco's desert wall. He has met with illegal migrants from the Punjab who have circumvented the high-tech fencing around the Spanish enclave of Ceuta. He has played a duet on the US-Mexico border wall with a percussionist who considers the barrier a vast musical instrument. He has visited fenced-in villages in northeast India, walked the migrant trails in Arizona, and traveled to Palestinian villages to witness the weekly protests against Israel's security barrier. From Native American reservations on the US-Mexico border, to Cyprus' divided capital, to the pubs and Peace Lines of Belfast, and to the "Great Wall of Montreal," Di Cintio has sought to understand what these structures say about those who build them, and how they influence the cultures that they pen in. He learns that while every wall fails to achieve what it was erected to achieve – the walls are never solutions – each wall succeeds at something else. Some walls define Us from Them with medieval clarity. Some walls encourage fear or feed hate. Some walls steal. Others kill. And every wall inspires its own subversion, either by the infiltrators who dare to go over, under or around them, or by the artists who transform them. MARCELLO DI CINTIO has enjoyed stints abroad in West Africa, North Africa, India and the Middle East. His most recent book, Poets and Pahlevans: A Journey Into the Heart of Iran, was published by Knopf in 2006; it won the Wilfred Eggleston Prize for Best Non-Fiction and was praised by the Calgary Herald as "graceful and sympathetic...finely balanced...beautifully written and uplifted by the author's agreeable personality...not to be missed."