"Lost on Earth," Mark Fritz's survey of the lives of contemporary refugees, reads like a volume of beautifully imagined short stories, and its addictive quality makes me wonder whether I loved it for the wrong reasons. Of course, they're the right reasons, too. In showing us the people usually reduced to terrible statistics … he makes all those foreign tragedies that clot the opening pages of the newspaper immediate and real. And he isn't simply compassionate: Beyond the gift of empathy he has an invaluable knack for liking his troubled subjects. As in "Angela's Ashes," the sparkle of personality turns a book you might expect to be unrelentingly grim into one that you don't want to end.  SALON | March 24, 1999

“It is a rare bit of luck these past 10 years that put a writer as gifted as Mark Fritz at most of our world’s historic venues.  …a remarkable blend of history, analysis and humanity.”  DETROIT FREE PRESS, April 11, 1999.

``Los Angeles Times correspondent Fritz presents a kaleidoscope portrait of the world's new homeless - displaced by political upheaval or economic blight, by bloodbaths in Liberia, Kuwait and Sri Lanka, the breakup of the Soviet Union, the reunification of Germany or the conflict in what used to be Yugoslavia. Fritz, who won a Pulitzer for his reporting from Rwanda, writes from a refreshingly international perspective born of legwork rather than glib assumptions of a "global village." In a departure from his conventional reporting, these frontline dispatches are deliberately hard-boiled and ironic, unfolding like a series of loosely interconnected short stories. He writes with street-wise empathy for his dislocated subjects….”  PUBLISHERS WEEKLY, Feb. 1, 1999.

“Fritz has laced this easily read and absorbing book with vignettes of refugees' journeys across borders and into lands they had no idea they ever would see. So many news stories have passed before our eyes in the last decade that we need a book like this. Thanks to Yugoslavian strongman Slobodan Milosevic, Fritz's book could not be more timely.”  ST. LOUIS POST-DISPATCH, April 25, 1999

“….Street stories from the main theaters of the migrations of the 1990s.  …Putting faces on the problem, Fritz should engage anyone involved with the refugee issue. …Sharp, contemporary journalism gives depth to the daily news images.” BOOKLIST, American Library Association, March 1, 1999

``These are not just touching stories of poor refugees caught in a world gone mad.  They are stories that starkly demonstrate just how interdependent the world has become.”  ST. PETERSBURG TIMES, April 4, 1999.

``…Accessible and insightful, written by a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist reporting from the field.  Fritz’s involvement is particularly relevant reading right now, given the NATO involvement in Yugoslavia, and provides a context that’s missing from daily headlines and nightly news reports..”  PORTLAND OREGONIAN, April 19, 1999.

 “This is an unpretentious book, but it brings out lucidly the moral and political problems caused by one of mankind's greatest migratory upheavals. ``Lost on Earth'' is a series of vivid dispatches from this shadowland of outlanders, and at their best they are the premier reports about the contemporary refugee.” BOSTON GLOBE, February 28, 1999.