The great escape : a true story of forced labor and immigrant dreams in America
(2023)

Nonfiction

Book

Call Numbers:
331.1173/SONI,S

Availability

Locations Call Number Status
Adult Nonfiction 331.1173/SONI,S Available

Details

PUBLISHED
Chapel Hill, North Carolina : Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill, [2023]
EDITION
First edition
DESCRIPTION

352 pages ; 23 cm

ISBN/ISSN
9781643750088, 1643750089 :, 1643750089, 9781643750088
LANGUAGE
English
NOTES

Dreams -- Man camp -- Escape -- Truth march -- Hunted -- Faith -- Epilogue: forgetting

In 2007, Saket Soni received an anonymous phone call from an Indian migrant worker inside a Mississippi labor camp. He and 500 other men were living in squalor in Gulf Coast "man camps," surrounded by barbed wire, watched by armed guards, crammed into cold trailers with putrid portable toilets, forced to eat moldy bread and frozen rice. Worse, lured by the promise of good work and green cards, the men had desperately scraped together up to 20,000 dollars each to apply for this "opportunity" to rebuild oil rigs after Hurricane Katrina, putting their families into impossible debt. Soni traces the workers' extraordinary escape; their march on foot to Washington, DC; and their 31-day hunger strike to bring attention to their cause.--