Will McGrath

Funny and heartfelt, this amalgamation of memoir and essay collection tells the story of twenty months the author spent in Lesotho, the small, landlocked kingdom surrounded by South Africa. There he finds a spirit of joyful absurdity and resolve, surrounded by people who take strangers' hands as they walk down the road, people who--with sweetest face--drop the dirtiest jokes in the southern hemisphere. But Lesotho is also a place where shepherds exact Old Testament retribution, where wounded pride incites murder and families are devastated by the AIDS epidemic. Driven by a spirit of openhearted cultural exchange in the style of Bill Bryson's In a Sunburned Country and Alexandra Fuller's Cocktail Hour Under the Tree of Forgetfulness, Will McGrath's Everything Lost Is Found Again is a love-drunk ballad to Lesotho, infusing humor and heart into pop ethnography.

Four Seasons in Lesotho

Everything Lost Is Found Again

Barbara Barbieri McGrath

Rob Bolster

Frank Mazzola, Jr.

Text and illustrations of the familiar O-shaped cereal help the reader count to ten and add groups of ten. On board pages.

1, 2, 3

The Cheerios Counting Book

In Farewell Transmission, Will McGrath guides us on a rambling quest into the enlightenment of other lives. Funny and heartbreaking, intimate and galvanizing, these essays venture from Yemen to Lesotho to the Bronx and beyond. We find Caravaggio at an Arizona homeless shelter and meet Elvis in rural Canada. We encounter diamond miners and professional wrestlers, night watchmen and righteous ex-cons—those wilderness prophets too frequently cropped from the picture.

This is a book of hiddenness: of secret lives and ghost stories and obscure passions. Whether he’s unraveling the fraught history of a noose in Namibia or wandering the Driftless Area with a modern-day goatherd, McGrath is on an excavation into landscapes rarely seen. Like Leslie Jamison’s The Empathy Exams and John Jeremiah Sullivan’s Pulphead, these essays pulse with electric prose and vivid characters, seeking out the invisible forces that bind us across our wondrous and troubling planet.

Farewell Transmission is a book about paying attention: to the concealed lives we encounter every day, and to the hidden worlds that exist within our own.

Notes from Hidden Spaces

Farewell Transmission

Ellen Block

AIDS has devastated communities across southern Africa. In Lesotho, a quarter of adults are infected. In Infected Kin, Block and McGrath argue that AIDS is fundamentally a kinship disease, examining the ways it transcends infected individuals and seeps into kin relations and networks of care.

Orphan Care and AIDS in Lesotho

Infected Kin

AIDS has devastated communities across southern Africa. In Lesotho, where a quarter of adults are infected, the wide-ranging implications of the disease have been felt in every family, disrupting key aspects of social life. In Infected Kin, Ellen Block and Will McGrath argue that AIDS is fundamentally a kinship disease, examining the ways it transcends infected individuals and seeps into kin relations and networks of care. While much AIDS scholarship has turned away from the difficult daily realities of those affected by the disease, Infected Kin uses both ethnographic scholarship and creative nonfiction to bring to life the joys and struggles of the Basotho people at the heart of the AIDS pandemic. The result is a book accessible to wide readership, yet built upon scholarship and theoretical contributions that ensure Infected Kin will remain relevant to anyone interested in anthropology, kinship, global health, and care. Supplementary teaching materials are available at: https://www.csbsju.edu/sociology/anthropology-teaching-resources/useful-resources/infected-kin-teaching-resources

Will McGrath

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