IMMERSION

Marshall recounts her journeys through foreign languages in this travel memoir.

While growing up in Kirkwood, Missouri, the author says, the “windows of [her] life remained largely shuttered.” But she says that her later study of non-English languages, and the process of acquiring fluency in more than a dozen of them, expanded her horizons in many ways: “These languages…introduced me to new ways of thriving, to new ways of seeing myself, of seeing others.” While in college, the author decided to study for a year in Spain, where her exposure to the Spanish language—which she had to master quickly in order to take Spanish-only classes—helped her find new levels of skill and self-sufficiency. After receiving a master’s degree in Spanish, and then a doctorate in Hispanic languages and literature, in the 1970s, she took a job as a translator for three years. After that she worked as a stay-at-home mom for a few years, but she longed to get another job using her language skills; she started again by working for three weeks as an interpreter for a church group traveling to Brazil. She soon found a full-time job as a U.S. government linguist, taking on assignments in various African countries, including Zambia during a failed coup d’état in 1990, South Africa immediately post-apartheid in 1994, and Tanzania in the company of President George W. Bush in 2008, among others. In this memoir, Marshall effectively details how her experiences in these countries, as she navigated their diverse languages, helped her better understand the world and her place in it. The author writes so lovingly about language acquisition that readers will find themselves itching to sign up for an immersion class. Here, for instance, she describes the pleasing syllabary of Amharic: “Each of its 260 symbols reminded me of a tiny piece of artwork….I wanted to copy the little pictures, draw the tiny bells, the cacti, the squiggly trees, as though sketching a picture.” Although this episodic book lacks a strong overarching narrative, the individual sections are often compelling and always informative.

A fluent and far-ranging celebration of communication and world travel.