Then, in March 2014, a former Salvation Army employee named Mark Isaacs, who had been stationed at the camp, published a tell-all memoir titled The Undesirables. He wrote about men who had survived wars and treacherous voyages losing all will to live on Nauru, with one man resorting to swallowing cleaning fluids, another driven mad and barking like a dog. Isaacs likened the camp to “death factories,” and said in an interview that it is about “taking resilient men and grinding them into the dust.” On an island that itself was systematically ground to dust, it’s a harrowing image. As harrowing
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