Coming to America.

When the Taliban took Kabul in 2021, Blumenstein, a former deputy managing editor of The New York Times (and now the president of NBC News, Editorial), rallied her colleagues to help more than 200 people relocate from Afghanistan. One hundred and twenty-four of them were Times employees and their families, brought back to the U.S. “in what is believed to be the largest private sponsorship in modern American history.” Over dinner, Blumenstein and Kapp, a friend and fellow writer, decided to follow the journey of four of those 124 individuals—resulting in “thirty-some individual trips, hundreds of hours on their college campuses and in their homes, observing their lives, hearing their self-reflections, their fears and hopes, and learning from them as much as about them.” But before readers hear about Marwa, Maryam, Mursal, and Samira, they find how Blumenstein pulled off their rescue from a country where even storefront mannequin heads needed to be hidden. It’s an absorbing tale involving foreign dignitaries, diplomatic finagling, and negotiations with the Taliban. This staging also serves another goal: highlighting “a truth that has been largely overlooked: the single biggest achievement of the US occupation may well have been the liberation and opening of opportunities for women and girls.” Journalists and scholars have for years decried the ways the U.S. has used the image of women wearing burqas as justification for war. Blumenstein, for her part, carefully balances opposing feminist views, describing Marwa’s decision to appear without a headscarf in a Times portrait and posting it on Instagram, while her sister Mursal enjoys wearing hers. Blumenstein says she became “obsessed” with helping the women. Along the way, she and fellow Times staffers founded the nonprofit Journalism Refugees Education Fund. It’s a reminder, like this book, of the priceless work that exiled journalists do to keep the rest of the world safe.

A gripping account of how refugees found peace in a new land.