A Peace Corps veteran recounts his experiences in a small Nepalese village.
Goyal, a lawyer, activist and specialist in rural development, narrates his life journey since he arrived in the town of Namje in 2001, discussing the projects in which he was involved and the skills he needed to acquire to become an effective volunteer and teacher in the village, where school-age girls carried water up the mountain from its source. Realizing that he had “to do something about this water crisis” so the children could come to school, he worked on solving the problem with the Peace Corps’ help. Recruited by villagers who had heard of his success at law school in the United States, Goyal returned in 2004 to build three schools. When he returned to the U.S. in 2008, he was hired as a lobbyist to work on doubling the Peace Corps budget. In addition to discussing his projects, the author examines similarities between Nepal and the U.S.; in both countries, he writes, “politics is not all that different from community organizing.” Congress became his village as he sought out how to get “directly to the highest power,” by catching congressmen and senators in corridors, “strategic loitering,” networking and using social media to mobilize citizen support. Goyal puts into sharp relief the Peace Corps’ funding within the total U.S. budget, and he punctuates his tale with instances of unfulfilled promises and unforeseen circumstances.
An interesting adventure with a good lesson: that having lots of money is not a prerequisite to accomplishing great things.Pub Date: Sept. 11, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-8070-0175-2
Page Count: 232
Publisher: Beacon Press
Review Posted Online: June 12, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2012
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The authors have created a sort of anti-Book of Virtues in this encyclopedic compendium of the ways and means of power.
Everyone wants power and everyone is in a constant duplicitous game to gain more power at the expense of others, according to Greene, a screenwriter and former editor at Esquire (Elffers, a book packager, designed the volume, with its attractive marginalia). We live today as courtiers once did in royal courts: we must appear civil while attempting to crush all those around us. This power game can be played well or poorly, and in these 48 laws culled from the history and wisdom of the world’s greatest power players are the rules that must be followed to win. These laws boil down to being as ruthless, selfish, manipulative, and deceitful as possible. Each law, however, gets its own chapter: “Conceal Your Intentions,” “Always Say Less Than Necessary,” “Pose as a Friend, Work as a Spy,” and so on. Each chapter is conveniently broken down into sections on what happened to those who transgressed or observed the particular law, the key elements in this law, and ways to defensively reverse this law when it’s used against you. Quotations in the margins amplify the lesson being taught. While compelling in the way an auto accident might be, the book is simply nonsense. Rules often contradict each other. We are told, for instance, to “be conspicuous at all cost,” then told to “behave like others.” More seriously, Greene never really defines “power,” and he merely asserts, rather than offers evidence for, the Hobbesian world of all against all in which he insists we live. The world may be like this at times, but often it isn’t. To ask why this is so would be a far more useful project.
If the authors are serious, this is a silly, distasteful book. If they are not, it’s a brilliant satire.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-670-88146-5
Page Count: 430
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 20, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1998
Categories: GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | PHILOSOPHY & RELIGION | PSYCHOLOGY | HISTORICAL & MILITARY
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Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
Categories: BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | HOLOCAUST | HISTORY | GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | GENERAL HISTORY
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