Homesick

Evidence, Efficacy, Ethnography

By: Nicholas Shapiro

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Paperback | 3 October 2025

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264 Pages

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Following Hurricane Katrina, the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) distributed over 120,000 trailers for emergency housing. Produced from engineered wood containing toxic amounts of formaldehyde, these shelters were vectors of illness and death. Although they were subsequently banned, FEMA trailers were resold and again used for housing, scattering their harm to other people and areas. In Homesick, Nicholas Shapiro draws on almost fifteen years working with impacted community members to trace how the story of toxic emergency housing units expands into a story of how all of our shelters became a seat of exposure and how we can collectively struggle for cleaner indoor air. Throughout, Shapiro questions the efficacy of the fundamental tools used to cultivate accountability, repair, and change, arguing for their reimagining. Detailing health effects as well as community and individual efforts to achieve better life, health, and justice, Shapiro highlights how homesickness for an otherwise future can herald meaningful change.

Industry Reviews

"Homesick skillfully combines investigative journalism and ethnography in charismatic detail to demonstrate the complex and interlocking structural systems that enable large-scale toxic exposure. Nicholas Shapiro's evocative writing and commitment to research captures allows those most burdened by the chemical impacts of power to tell their own expert stories of life, survival, and death. This book is a timely, stellar example of what happens to both research and the researcher when the author lets the case lead them where they need to go. Homesick is a book to contend with." - Max Liboiron, author of Pollution is Colonialism "Beautifully crafted and deeply engaging, Homesick is a stunning ethnography of the expansive predicament that was formed alongside the hope of building affordable mobile homes with ingredients now known to be chemically toxic. Nicholas Shapiro brings readers into the multiple sites of illness, fretting, maneuvering, and optimism to offer a riveting account of the nested domains of formaldehyde toxicity in manufactured mobile homes and that make those who live in them, and the homes themselves, sick." - Vincanne Adams, author of Glyphosate and the Swirl: An Agrochemical Chemical on the Move

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