LOST ON EARTH: Nomads of the New World.

• Author: McGray, Douglas
• Position: Review

LOST ON EARTH: Nomads of the New World by Mark Fritz Little, Brown, $25

I HAD BEEN SITTING IN A LOCAL coffeehouse for most of an afternoon before I noticed the photographs on the wall. A small child posed in the dim light of a railroad box car. A young boy's face crowded another frame, all eyes and matted bangs. Each of the half-dozen shots in the series depicted a scene from an abandoned train in Cakovec, Croatia, where refugees were taking shelter from the war in Yugoslavia.

These kinds of images have become familiar in the 1990s, a decade in which an unprecedented number of people have left their homes in search of safety, political freedom, or a better wage. Photographers and television crews have captured waves of refugees fleeing violence in Kinshasa and Sarajevo and rafts depositing waterlogged asylum-seekers on the shores of Italy and the Florida Keys. But if the camera lens has made these crises real for millions of Americans and prompted a harder government line on some human rights abusers, it has also tended to keep its subjects at a safe distance--dramatically rendered, appropriately framed.

Los Angeles Times correspondent Mark Fritz challenges this voyeurism in an ambitious, if uneven new collection of political reportage, Lost on Earth: Nomads of the New World. Fritz, who won a Pulitzer prize in 1994 for his reporting from Rwanda, chronicles moments from the lives of ordinary people--relief workers and refugees, immigrants and xenophobes, soldiers and prisoners of war--caught up in the immigration and refugee crises that followed the end of the Cold War.

Lost on Earth opens in the waning years of East German communism. By 1989, Budapest was only half-heartedly enforcing the Eastern Bloc's strict travel restrictions. Tens of thousands of defectors were slipping through Hungary to the West.

Most of the first half of Lost on Earth is set at least partially in Germany, as is the very end, a moving account of the war in Bosnia. Germany's liberal asylum policies, massive influx of foreigners, socioeconomic disparities, and racial tensions provide Fritz with an apt window on the world of the '90s. When wars erupted in the Balkans and the Persian Gulf, more refugees arrived on Germany's doorstep than anywhere else in Europe. When cracks appeared in the Soviet edifice, ethnic Germans whose ancestors had emigrated to Russia during the reign of Catherine the Great clamored to return. Fritz's reporting from Rwanda, Liberia, and Somalia...