J. Malcolm Garcia – författare

They bear labels instead of names—noncombatant, unintended victim, collateral damage. Theirs are the blurred faces and forms seen in news footage shot from a moving vehicle. And when soldiers, media, and profiteers move on to the next conflict, they stay behind to cope amid the wreckage. They have stories to tell to anyone who will pause long enough to hear them.In What Wars Leave Behind, J. Malcolm Garcia reveals the people and pain behind the statistics. He writes about impoverished families scraping by in Cairo’s city of the dead, ordinary Syrians pretending all is well as shells explode around them, and others caught in conflicts that rage long after the cameramen have packed up and gone away.Garcia describes his travels in some of the world’s hotspots in Central Asia, the Middle East, and Africa. In a series of personal travel essays that read like short stories, he exposes the endless messiness of war and the failings of good intentions, and he traces their impact on the lives of natives in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Egypt, Kosovo, Chad, and Syria. He discovers amazing resilience among people who must struggle just to survive each day.Garcia gives readers the sort of gritty detail learned from immersing himself in other cultures. He eats the food, drinks the tea, and endures the oppressive heat. These are the stories of how a middle-class guy from the Midwest with a social work degree learned to experience and embrace the cultures of Third World countries in conflict—and lived to tell the tale.

The first book that J. Malcolm Garcia ever bought would impact his life in a way that the then twelve-year-old could have never imagined. The Day the Red Baron Died plunged Garcia into the intrigue and excitement of the World War I German flying ace's life and death. Garcia was enraptured and brimming with questions. His mother encouraged the curious boy to write to the book's author, Dale M. Titler. When the author replied, a friendship began that shaped Garcia's life.In Riding through Katrina with the Red Baron's Ghost, Garcia chronicles his relationship with Titler. It was that connection that brought Garcia to New Orleans only two weeks after Hurricane Katrina devastated the city and its citizens. Not having heard from his friend in years, Garcia made the split-second decision to go to New Orleans to try to find the man who meant so much to him.A harrowing account of New Orleans directly after Katrina—told in Garcia's award-winning journalistic style—Riding through Katrina with the Red Baron's Ghost tells a personal story of a thirty-year bond that defined a young man, as well as the universal story of the horror and devastation Katrina left in its wake.