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Living Poor A Peace Corps Chronicle
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Book Synopsis Living Poor; a Peace Corps Chronicle by : Moritz Thomsen
Download or read book Living Poor; a Peace Corps Chronicle written by Moritz Thomsen and published by University of Washington Press. This book was released on 1969 with total page 330 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: At the age of 48, Moritz Thomsen sold his pig farm and joined the Peace Corps. As he tells the story, his awareness of the comic elements in the human situation--including his own--and his ability to convey it in fast-moving, earthy prose have madeLiving Poora classic. "Hilariously funny at times, grimly sad at others and elavened with perceptive insights into the ways of the people and with breathtaking descriptions of the Ecuadorian landscape."-St. Louis Post-Dispatch
Download or read book Living Poor written by Moritz Thomsen and published by . This book was released on 2000-05 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Book Synopsis The Farm on the River of Emeralds by : Moritz Thomsen
Download or read book The Farm on the River of Emeralds written by Moritz Thomsen and published by Vintage. This book was released on 1989 with total page 380 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Kosher Chinese written by Michael Levy and published by Holt Paperbacks. This book was released on 2011-07-05 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An irreverent tale of an American Jew serving in the Peace Corps in rural China, which reveals the absurdities, joys, and pathos of a traditional society in flux In September of 2005, the Peace Corps sent Michael Levy to teach English in the heart of China's heartland. His hosts in the city of Guiyang found additional uses for him: resident expert on Judaism, romantic adviser, and provincial basketball star, to name a few. His account of overcoming vast cultural differences to befriend his students and fellow teachers is by turns poignant and laugh-out-loud funny. While reveling in the peculiarities of life in China's interior, the author also discovered that the "other billion" (people living far from the coastal cities covered by the American media) have a complex relationship with both their own traditions and the rapid changes of modernization. Lagging behind in China's economic boom, they experience the darker side of "capitalism with Chinese characteristics," daily facing the schizophrenia of conflicting ideologies. Kosher Chinese is an illuminating account of the lives of the residents of Guiyang, particularly the young people who will soon control the fate of the world.
Download or read book The Lower River written by Paul Theroux and published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. This book was released on 2012 with total page 361 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A taut, tense, darkly suspenseful novel about a man who flees to Africa after his marriage falls apart, only to be caught up in a precarious situation in a seemingly benign village.
Download or read book My Two Wars written by Moritz Thomsen and published by Steerforth. This book was released on 2007-12-31 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Moritz Thomsen’s My Two Wars describes the great battles in his life – one against a rich, tyrannical father; the other against anti-aircraft gunners over Germany in 1943 and 1944. It was completed shortly before Thomsen’s death, and with it he concluded the story of his unusual life. In this posthumously published masterpiece he returns to his youth growing up in a wealthy Seattle household with the father he despised, and goes off to war in Europe as a bombardier with the Eighth Air Force. In his introduction Page Stegner calls it “the best narrative account ever written of an imperfect and fragile human soul caught up in the air war over Germany.” But it is Thomsen’s other war – his lifelong and monumental battle with his father – which begins and ends the book and makes My Two Wars one of the most outrageous and memorable father-and-son stories ever told.
Download or read book River Town written by Peter Hessler and published by Harper Collins. This book was released on 2010-09-21 with total page 382 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A New York Times Notable Book Winner of the Kiriyama Book Prize In the heart of China's Sichuan province, amid the terraced hills of the Yangtze River valley, lies the remote town of Fuling. Like many other small cities in this ever-evolving country, Fuling is heading down a new path of change and growth, which came into remarkably sharp focus when Peter Hessler arrived as a Peace Corps volunteer, marking the first time in more than half a century that the city had an American resident. Hessler taught English and American literature at the local college, but it was his students who taught him about the complex processes of understanding that take place when one is immersed in a radically different society. Poignant, thoughtful, funny, and enormously compelling, River Town is an unforgettable portrait of a city that is seeking to understand both what it was and what it someday will be.
Book Synopsis Romero's Legacy by : Pilar Hogan Closkey
Download or read book Romero's Legacy written by Pilar Hogan Closkey and published by Rowman & Littlefield Publishers. This book was released on 2007-08-04 with total page 127 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Pilar Hogan Closkey and John Hogan have brought together the annual Archbishop Oscar Romero Lectures (2001-2007) to consider the life and death of Archbishop Romero and the daily struggles of the poor in our world, especially in the city of Camden, New Jersey-one of America's poorest cities. Romero's 'dangerous memory' provides the background, while urban poverty and the option for the poor are the foreground. Romero's commitment to the poor compels us to look at ourselves, and the authors of each chapter remind us of Romero's dangerous memory and his undying hope in the promised future. Taken as a whole, the book reminds us of the tough questions behind the real meaning of the 'option for the poor.' Can we as a faith community and institution move beyond high-sounding slogans and really opt for the poor? What are the costs? What are the risks? Especially in these difficult times of war, terrorism, and scandal, can we in the Church rebuild trust and be a sign of a future of justice and peace announced by Jesus?
Book Synopsis Yemen Chronicle by : Steven C. Caton
Download or read book Yemen Chronicle written by Steven C. Caton and published by Hill and Wang. This book was released on 2006-10-03 with total page 354 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A report like no other from the heart of the Arab Middle East In 1979, Steven C. Caton went to a remote area of Yemen to do fieldwork on the famous oral poetry of its tribes. The recent hostage crisis in Iran made life perilous for a young American in the Middle East; worse, he was soon embroiled in a dangerous local conflict. Yemen Chronicle is Caton's touchingly candid acount of the extraordinary events that ensued. One day a neighboring sheikh came angrily to the sanctuary village where Caton lived, claiming that a man there had abducted his daughter and another girl. This was cause for war, and even though the culprit was captured and mediation efforts launched, tribal hostilities simmered for months. A man who was helping to resolve the dispute befriended Caton, showing him how the poems recited by the belligerents were connected to larger Arab conflicts and giving him refuge when the sanctuary was attacked. Then, unexpectedly, Caton himself was arrested and jailed for being an American spy. It was 2001 before Caton could return toYemen to untangle the story of why he had been imprisoned and what had happened to the missing girls. Placing his contradictory experiences in their full context, Yemen Chronicle is not only an invaluable assessment of classical ethnographic procedures but also a profound meditation on the political, cultural, and sexual components of modern Arab culture.
Book Synopsis The Last Train to Zona Verde by : Paul Theroux
Download or read book The Last Train to Zona Verde written by Paul Theroux and published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. This book was released on 2013 with total page 373 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The world's most acclaimed travel writer journeys through western Africa from Cape Town to the Congo.
Book Synopsis In Their Own Hands by : Jeffrey Ashe
Download or read book In Their Own Hands written by Jeffrey Ashe and published by Berrett-Koehler Publishers. This book was released on 2014-09-15 with total page 240 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Two and a half billion people worldwide, most of them desperately poor villagers, need a better way to save and to borrow. Even the most innovative banking institutions can’t reach them; savings groups can. In savings groups, members save what they can in a communal pot and loan their growing fund to each other for their short-term needs. Jeffrey Ashe and Kyla Neilan illustrate how these savings groups form and function and how little “outside” support is actually required for their success. Drawing on decades of Ashe’s personal experience, this book describes how he developed Saving for Change, which leveraged the wisdom and strength of group members to train and establish new groups. This model has impacted the lives of 680,000 people across five countries. Savings groups are a “catalytic innovation” that bypasses subsidies, dependency, and high costs while effectively reducing chronic hunger, building assets, and empowering the community. Today, saving groups have 9 million members around the globe—with minimal support, membership could grow to ten times this number.
Download or read book Jarhead written by Anthony Swofford and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2005-11-11 with total page 273 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Anthony Swofford's Jarhead is the first Gulf War memoir by a frontline infantry marine, and it is a searing, unforgettable narrative. When the marines -- or "jarheads," as they call themselves -- were sent in 1990 to Saudi Arabia to fight the Iraqis, Swofford was there, with a hundred-pound pack on his shoulders and a sniper's rifle in his hands. It was one misery upon another. He lived in sand for six months, his girlfriend back home betrayed him for a scrawny hotel clerk, he was punished by boredom and fear, he considered suicide, he pulled a gun on one of his fellow marines, and he was shot at by both Iraqis and Americans. At the end of the war, Swofford hiked for miles through a landscape of incinerated Iraqi soldiers and later was nearly killed in a booby-trapped Iraqi bunker. Swofford weaves this experience of war with vivid accounts of boot camp (which included physical abuse by his drill instructor), reflections on the mythos of the marines, and remembrances of battles with lovers and family. As engagement with the Iraqis draws closer, he is forced to consider what it is to be an American, a soldier, a son of a soldier, and a man. Unlike the real-time print and television coverage of the Gulf War, which was highly scripted by the Pentagon, Swofford's account subverts the conventional wisdom that U.S. military interventions are now merely surgical insertions of superior forces that result in few American casualties. Jarhead insists we remember the Americans who are in fact wounded or killed, the fields of smoking enemy corpses left behind, and the continuing difficulty that American soldiers have reentering civilian life. A harrowing yet inspiring portrait of a tormented consciousness struggling for inner peace, Jarhead will elbow for room on that short shelf of American war classics that includes Philip Caputo's A Rumor of War and Tim O'Brien's The Things They Carried, and be admired not only for the raw beauty of its prose but also for the depth of its pained heart.
Book Synopsis A Gringa in Bogotá by : June Carolyn Erlick
Download or read book A Gringa in Bogotá written by June Carolyn Erlick and published by University of Texas Press. This book was released on 2010-03-01 with total page 175 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: To many foreigners, Colombia is a nightmare of drugs and violence. Yet normal life goes on there, and, in Bogotá, it's even possible to forget that war still ravages the countryside. This paradox of perceptions—outsiders' fears versus insiders' realities—drew June Carolyn Erlick back to Bogotá for a year's stay in 2005. She wanted to understand how the city she first came to love in 1975 has made such strides toward building a peaceful civil society in the midst of ongoing violence. The complex reality she found comes to life in this compelling memoir. Erlick creates her portrait of Bogotá through a series of vivid vignettes that cover many aspects of city life. As an experienced journalist, she lets the things she observes lead her to larger conclusions. The courtesy of people on buses, the absence of packs of stray dogs and street trash, and the willingness of strangers to help her cross an overpass when vertigo overwhelms her all become signs of convivencia—the desire of Bogotanos to live together in harmony despite decades of war. But as Erlick settles further into city life, she finds that "war in the city is invisible, but constantly present in subtle ways, almost like the constant mist that used to drip down from the Bogotá skies so many years ago." Shattering stereotypes with its lively reporting, A Gringa in Bogotá is must-reading for going beyond the headlines about the drug war and bloody conflict.
Book Synopsis Riding Into the Wind by : Elly Foote
Download or read book Riding Into the Wind written by Elly Foote and published by Southbank, B.C. : NE Book Works. This book was released on 2003 with total page 369 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This carefully crafted work brings you 70 color pictures, 40+ original drawings, and a story that burns with intensity, radiates personal crises, and reminds us how life can be lived. It is about horses, and not about horses at all. It's about the human journey we're all traveling.
Book Synopsis The Peace Corps Experience by : P. David Searles
Download or read book The Peace Corps Experience written by P. David Searles and published by University Press of Kentucky. This book was released on 2021-12-14 with total page 374 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For more than 35 years, the Peace Corps has pursued John F. Kennedy's vision of helping people of the Third World build a better life. Yet with the exception of a few celebrations of its early years, little effort has been made to document that organization's history. Now a former deputy director of the Peace Corps offers a first-hand look at life in the agency—both in the field and at headquarters—and a radical reinterpretation of its history during the Nixon and Ford administrations. By the end of the 1960s, the Peace Corps was in disarray. Debate raged over its effectiveness, and many new volunteers embraced the antiestablishment behavior of the day's youth. When President Nixon appointed Joseph Blatchford as director in 1969, some insiders felt the agency's days were numbered—especially when Blatchford set about re-evaluating the Peace Corps' mission and initiated a program called New Directions to reorient its work. Many observers simply lump Blatchford's efforts with the failures and faults of the Nixon administration. David Searles, however, contends that the new director's initiatives revitalized the Peace Corps and made it a more relevant organization. Searles faithfully relates the history of these policies and their implementation in the field, drawing on his personal experience as country director for the Peace Corps in the Philippines. He shows how, despite constant carping from veterans of the early Peace Corps and much furor at headquarters, New Directions reenergized the agency and renewed and reaffirmed the Peace Corps' mission. Searles's descriptions of political maneuverings are incisively observed, and his firsthand characterizations of Peace Corps life richly impart the joys and frustrations of volunteer work. The Peace Corps Experience will give historians a new perspective on the agency and will also interest anyone who has served in the Peace Corps or who wants to understand it.
Download or read book Sound of Hunger written by Chris Heal and published by Uniform. This book was released on 2018 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Sound of Hunger is a true story that centers on two German brothers, Erich and Georg Gerth, u-boat commanders, and the First Word War and its aftermath. The Gerths' lives and careers as navy officers are set against the military, political and social environment of their times. Carefully-nurtured myths of national innocence and guilt are uncovered; discrediting truths and war crimes of both the Allies and Germany are brought into the limelight. This is not conventional history, but a personal view of the events that were integral to the Gerth brothers, to see how they were changed by what they heard, were taught and experienced. Sound of Hunger is unashamedly intimate in selection, perhaps eccentric in places; a personal journey that explains what was newly-found, how it was investigated and understood. Whatever you think you know about this war, be prepared to challenge your beliefs. The book takes its title from the thrust of the war, not in the trenches, but in the deliberate attempts by both sides to starve each other's civilian populations. The damage to Germany's children was generational as food shortages were deliberately extended by the Allies to force Germany to a debilitating peace. The brothers were born in booming Berlin in the 1880s, their father dying when they were young. Their mother sacrificed to see them through one of Berlin's most prestigious secondary schools and paid their considerable fees as cadets. In the burgeoning naval fleet, they were of the lowest social class allowed into this elite new force. Their careers were exciting, extracted from German archives: spying in South America, bombardment of the English coast, sea battles, torpedoed and mined ships, and desperate survivals. One, as a French prisoner of war for over two years, made daring escape attempts, the other scuttling his boat in the Mediterranean amid collapsing Austrian armies. Remarkable contacts tumble from the pages, villains and heroes, the Kaiser, Alfred von Tirpitz, family-friend Wilhelm Canaris, Karl Dönitz, the Red Baron, Adolf Hitler. The Gerths' personal decisions are interwoven with Germany's bid for world power, naval training, the founding of the Flanders u-boat bases, the importance of the Baltic and the Mediterranean, the economic blockade of Germany and its devastating effects on European neutral countries, unfettered submarine warfare, prison camps, Britain's virulent propaganda designed to drag America into the conflict, and the German collapse. The story does not end well. The brothers return to Germany and the post-war fight to the death between a new socialist republic, a murderous officer corps and the Spartacist revolution. The Gerths are forced to take sides. One becomes a philosopher and a businessman, seeking mental refuge. The other marries a countess and is swept into extreme right-wing politics: manning the barricades, the murder of communist leaders Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg, covertly preparing the second u-boat fleet for the next war. Canaris is everywhere scheming. Close family contacts are developed with Europe's Catholic hierarchy, even to Eugenio Pacelli, the pope-to-be, the Spanish royal family, and with elite Paris society, in a very public attempt to rouse religious sentiment against a second world war. Everything falls apart. The German President and Foreign Minister together act with Rudolf Hess to ruin one of the brothers. Heinrich Himmler moves to take over of the legendary Ufa film studios, beggaring another family member. The family's Jewish connections are disclosed: it is a time of forged passports, concentration camps, attempted flight to South America; and children hidden in Roman convents. The Gestapo steps in. One brother dies in poignant and lurid circumstances, the other becomes a recluse after watching the ruins of his family home and business, flattened by British carpet bombing of a demilitarised town.
Download or read book Che Guevara written by Allan Todd and published by Pen and Sword History. This book was released on 2024-07-30 with total page 407 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Although Che Guevara was murdered almost sixty years ago, the famous red-and-black image of him is still widely seen around the world: at leftist political demonstrations and, ironically - given his strong opposition to capitalism - on many commercial products. However, he was a controversial figure during his lifetime - and remains so today. On both the political left and the political right, attitudes to him vary widely: while some see him as a romantic, highly-principled and legendary fighter for the world’s poor and exploited masses, others depict him either as an unrealistic and thus irrelevant adventurer, or even as a ruthless and cold-blooded butcher. Consequently, biographies about him over the decades have ranged from the overly sympathetic, to the extremely hostile. As well as covering aspects of his family life and his loves - and his early, sometimes less-than-revolutionary, attitudes - this biography, as expected, deals with those areas for which Che is best known. These include his adventurous explorations, as a young man on a motorbike, of Latin and Central America; his leadership and bravery during Cuba’s Revolutionary War; his practical and theoretical contributions to the conduct of guerrilla warfare; and his emergence as an international revolutionary legend who inspired radical young people in the 1960s, and who continues to inspire rebellious people around the world today. However, this biography also explores other aspects of Che’s life which are not so well-known. From an early age, he developed a keen love of reading, covering an eclectic mix of adventure stories, poetry, history and philosophy - and, from his teens, he began a lifetime habit of making notes on what he read. He also became a strong chess player, able enough to draw with one of the world’s leading grandmasters. Even during guerrilla campaigns, he managed to maintain those loves. Since his murder, he has emerged as an original contributor to Marxist economics and philosophy. It was his wide-ranging studies that led him to become an outspoken opponent of the ‘orthodox’ communism followed in the Soviet Union - and of its Cold War foreign policy of ‘peaceful coexistence’. His tolerance of, and willingness to work with, those having different views saw him accused of Maoism - and even Trotskyism. More accurately, Che has bequeathed the unique strand of revolutionary socialism known as ‘Guevarism’.
