This was a mixed back for me. I was intrigued by the premise of the book and it delivered some quite astute musings on the world and its borders. But as is often the case with essay collections, some work better than others. Still a good read though, a few thought-provoking bits and I rather enjoyed the writing style.

Many thanks to Netgalley and University of Nebraska Press for my copy. This was a very interesting and thought provoking read, mostly about little known country borders but also about the consequences of war, and the terrible damage humans have done to perceived foreigners. Tolerance and kindness are the very least we should do to everyone we are privileged to share this planet with. A recommended read for all world travellers.

I was expecting more content on the current migration issues. Mostly, what Hemley tells us is how he likes to visit enclaves and exclaves and stray bits of nations, including some people who have changed nationality without leaving home. (No mention of embassies: I have often gone abroad to work without leaving Ireland.)

The British Raj didn't have problems over who was which citizen; when they left, India divided into India and two portions of Pakistan, and somehow a lot of stray villages and farms were on either side according to which mughal lord used to own them. Then Bangladesh broke away from Pakistan and that confused matters more. Finally as the writer visits, the drawn out court issues have been concluded with territory swaps, offers to rehome people, passport changes, and massive fence building projects. Foreseeably, some of the impecunious villagers say they were badly treated by neighbours because they lived in another country's farm; some chose to stay put and hope they would now be accepted while most chose to move to India since they already had Indian passports. Few wanted to move in the other direction. (A revisit found the newcomers hadn't prospered.)

A more cheerful look at the craziness of Netherlands and Belgium, in which a village's streets are bisected, is just begging to be compared and contrasted with Northern Ireland, in my opinion, but this doesn't occur.

Kaliningrad and a bitter, war-torn past; a political refugee of sorts in Cuba; the rudeness of the Chinese and Filipinas and others on race issues; a not-seeming to fit section on small segments of rainforest available to the tourist; a Chinese merchant who prospered beyond the local imagining and buys up everything expensive from pangolins for eating to endangered rainforest wood for ornament. There's more, but perhaps the most memorable interview is with a young man migrant to Australia from Afghanistan, who can't be a citizen and can't work, and can't go home because his family have been killed.

Hemley himself wonders if travel writers should do their job when greenhouse gases are flooding the planet. I would tend to wonder that too, but if they base themselves in one area and write about that area, travelling as the locals do, they are minimising their footprint and save the rest of us from doing all that travel to find out what's in those places. Upon being challenged - is he a journalist - Hemley describes himself as a professor. I believe a journalist would have gone further in finding and reporting conflicts of today, but Hemley does at times relate more than is comfortable about the past.

This book will be of interest to armchair travellers, anthropologists, international business students, world geopolitics students and environmentalists. Between the South American locals felling rare trees to sell to Asia and the Chinese squatting among their cracking trunks, we can piece together a picture of the destruction caused by too many humans, who are often, we see, no kinder to humans.
I read an e-ARC from Net Galley. This is an unbiased review.

The mixing of the reporting on the political realities of travel and the abstract fond memoir revisits was not done well and the one book reads like two.

Robin Hemley takes a look at nationhood, patriotism and identity, largely by visiting enclaves/exclaves - bits of countries separated from the ‘motherland’ by history, geography, lines drawn on maps that don’t quite make sense, or shifting borders.

The personal writing, conversational style and geographical geekery in itself make this a fascinating read. However, it goes beyond lines-on-maps to consider what it is a person is really attached to when they say they love their country. I may not agree with everything he puts forward, but I found this interesting and thought-provoking, and would like to read more by the author.

Borderline Citizen by Robin Hemley
By Jack | February 26, 2020 | Book Review
The full title is Borderline Citizen: Dispatches from the Outskirts of Nationhood and it is by Robin Hemley.

The author discusses being a citizen of the world, what that means, and the meaning of travel. The book is a mix of travel writing (dispatches), philosophy, and political thoughts with a bit of autobiography.

I found most parts of the book very interesting and a few parts not so much. The latter were towards the end of the book so I suspect I was just a bit tired of some longer dispatches.

As usual, my thanks to https://www.netgalley.com/ for letting me read this before publication.

A book that could of been ripped from today’s headlines.An interesting look at the authors travels at his ideas on patriotism nationalism,Many issues I identify with the author gives us a lotto think about would be excellent for book club discussions.#netgalley#uofnebraskapress.

Thank you to the University of Nebraska Press and NetGalley for an ARC in exchange for an honest review.

This book is a series of travel essays that looks at issues that have become ever more prescient in our times, such as national identity, belonging and patriotism in times of migration, shifting borders and refugee crises - and appeal to me personally on a visceral level, as I spent a lot of my younger years searching for answers to questions like these in my own life. Up to about the halfway point of the book, I found it interesting and well-written, but in the second half of the book I got increasingly annoyed at the author's tendency to go off on a tangent and lose a lot of the power of his storytelling because he got lost in the thickets rather than continuing on the path he had forged.

This book had a lot of interesting material, but the author got off on many tangents in the middle of his stories and zipped from one topic to another without a lot of transition. I found this book difficult to get into, and I ended up skimming material that veered off course. I wanted to like this book and found the topic very interesting, but it skipped around way too much for my tastes.

We live in an age where for many of us travel is considered a right. Given the environmental cost of travel and the way that much of it is merely to provide diversion from everyday lives, it was refreshing and reassuring to read Robin Hemley’s introduction to Borderline Citizens, in which he expressed the desire for his travel to have a purpose. Before we even approach the fascinating work that Hemley has put together, this is an important issue for me.

I find myself increasingly caught in a tension of beliefs between a radical localism and a global outlook and I see good writing as a crucial balance to that tension. Humans are having a devastating impact on the world around us and this is the main driver for my desire to live a local life that reduces my negative impact on the planet and (hopefully) ultimately can make it a positive, regenerative impact. At the same time, however, I have grown up in an age where technology has made the whole world more accessible to me and I have seen the benefits of shared journeys and experience and of understanding my place in that broader context.

It is important that we have connectors who can bring back stories and link our local communities to the bigger picture, without the need for all of us to jump on a plane. Robin Hemley fits this role perfectly, aware of the importance of what he is doing and the obligation he owes to the earth to ensure that his travel adds value far beyond him as an individual. In doing so, he presents in Borderline Citizens a series of insights from a range of settings that sit precariously on the edges of nationhood and lead us to question the meaning and value of the nation state.

The stories are diverse. A refugee exiled to an island off Australia to prevent him making a new life for himself and simply trying to do as many good things as he can before being sent back to Afghanistan where he expects to be killed. The Union Jacks that fly across the Falkland Islands clinging to a culture 8,000 miles away that bears little resemblance to the reality of life in the South Atlantic and stifles its own emerging identity. The confused identity of being India surrounded by Bangladesh and vice versa. The people of Manila remembering the horrors of Japanese destruction during WW2 with a strange mix of brutality and humour.

Each of the stories is enlightening, but taken together they leave the reader with a deep recognition that people are people and our national identities, especially when feeding a sense of nationalism, drive us apart and seek to separate us, rather than bring us together. That is not to say that humanity should be homogenised, our local cultures are hugely important as they are forged from life in that place and hold the handed down wisdom of generations adapting to climate, soil and the local environment. When that culture develops into nationalism, however, and seeks to build up one at the expense of an “other” it turns from an inclusive positive to a divisive negative.

Borderline Citizens is part of a proud heritage of travel writing that helps us to understand each other in a way that allows us to be different but united. We are able to celebrate the different experiences and environments that have shaped our distinct cultures while accepting each other as fundamentally the same. We can share, empathise and learn from each other without any need or desire to compete or feel superior, knowing that our differences are not judgments to be decided better or worse, but journeys to be shared and enjoyed.

As we transition into a new decade it feels like this is a message we need more than ever as we see Western democracies turning increasingly to populist voices of national identity. The winning messages in recent years have been about building walls and separating from our neighbours, when the crises we face as a species need us to collaborate rather than compete. We need to hear more stories like those Robin Hemley is sharing, but we also need to find a way of telling them that can be absorbed into our collective conscience as effectively as the snappy soundbites of populist nationalism. That is an enormous challenge, but somewhere in the solution is a place for good writing such as this and I commend it to you.

It's the 1st of January and I just stumbled home from a rather exciting NYE with former neighbours turned friends. Many of us are expatriates who've made London home.

One of the conversations we, have after countdown and singing "Auld Lang Syne", is how we identify more with being Londoners than wherever we moved from.

That conversation made me curious about books written about this complex feeling of identity we have when we move cities or countries.

When I picked up Robin's book, I was expecting he'd express the conundrums of being a nomad (voluntary or involuntary).

I was not disappointed.

He told stories of people who were forced to flee their countries due to wars or persecutions. I learned about the "World Passport", which I found so fascinating that I applied for it.

The conversations in the book provoked emotions ranging from heart wrenching to empathy.

Borderline Citizen is a thought-provoking book that examines the whole idea of national identity where people are defined by which side of a man made line they live on. More relevantly to this book he looks at enclaves of people cut off from what they still perceive to be their home country. Most poignantly he sees the graves of soldiers who died for an empire that no longer exists .
The book is very much a stream of consciousness and author Robin Hemley also discusses the casual racism thrown at at his Filipina wife and the barbaric behaviour of the Japanese in The Philippines as part of his discussion about racial identity.I could relate to both knowing Filipino survivors of the occupation and having a very dark Filipino friend who more than once has overheard Americans asking, "who's the Nigerian?" within earshot not realising he speaks and understands English as well as they do.
A very good point that Hemley makes is that most countries are relatively new and borders change all the time but nationalists invariably invoke their country's "ancient" status as reason/excuse to see their country as somehow superior to those of others, Great Britain for example is less than 300 years old,, Italy and Germany much younger.
Hemley travels the world meeting people for whom the subject of their nationality affects their lives , he speaks to refugees, those living in places where the borders have changed around them and places where they cross a border several times just walking down the road.
An excellent and engrossing read , I read it in one sitting , that shows how which side of a line on a map or a border fence someone lives can have a massive effect on their life.

Thanks to Robin Hemley, University of Nebraska Press and Netgalley for the ARC in return for an honest review,