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The Book of the Week is “A Greek Tragedy, One Day, A Deadly Shipwreck, and the Human Cost of the Refugee Crisis” by Jeanne Carstensen, published in 2025.
The author a bit naively labeled her jumbled compilation of stories, “the” refugee crisis. It was tiny compared to WWII’s refugee crisis. Two among many others that occurred from the second half of the 1970’s into the 1980’s included the “boat people” in the waterways between the United States and Cuba, and between Vietnam and Thailand. By the 1980’s, the United States and Thailand respectively, resented taking in those refugees.
A mere twenty years later, refugees (mostly from Syria, Afghanistan, Iran and Iraq) in overcrowded vessels in the Aegean Sea were fleeing their troubled homelands. By 2015, Jordan, Lebanon and Turkey were tired of taking in those refugees.
In this hodgepodge of a volume, the author described the various groups of people (smugglers and the smuggled, humanitarian workers, the rescuers and the rescued, residents in the area, and government officials) involved in a late October 2015 disaster in the Aegean Sea. Two overcrowded boats collided. Organized crime groups in Turkey ran the people-smuggling rings which refugees hired for steep prices, to help them get to Greece, and they hoped, to freedom.
The governments of Turkey and Greece don’t cooperate in investigating refugees who disappear while fleeing their homelands. So no one has accurate numbers on the dead and missing on the aforementioned boat collision. Never mind the number who have gone missing through the decades.
Read the book to learn: the history of the region; the extremely good and bad behavior prompted by the disaster (hint: among the bad– price-gouging of food and supplies for the refugees; among the good– people risking their own lives to save others’); and the prevailing political, cultural and social conditions of that particular time period.