A memoir that will particularly interest baby boomers considering the Peace Corps for extended volunteer service.
An epistolary account of a retired couple’s Peace Corps experiences in Mexico.
Sally Jo Nelson Botzler and Richard George Botzler, former professors at Humboldt State University in California, spent two years in the Peace Corps, helping the residents of the town of Jalpan de Serra in the Mexican state of Querétaro, beginning in 2009. The bulk of this book is made up of emails that they sent to friends and family during their service, a format that lends immediacy to their tales. However, there’s also a fair amount of repetition, as they seem to preserve the letters in their entirety instead of editing them down. For instance, some variation of “We’d love to hear news from all of you” appears at the end of many missives. The letters maintain an informal yet educational tone, and it’s gratifying to see the Botzlers incorporate Spanish phrases more comfortably as the months pass. The book includes amusing tidbits, such as an account of Rick’s talent for dispatching large cockroaches with a metal spatula or their observation that sometimes two days were required for laundry to dry due to local humidity. They were present not only for the bicentennial celebration of Mexico’s independence from Spain, but also the centenary of the beginning of the Mexican Revolution. They also witnessed more common cultural experiences, such as the Day of the Dead and quinceañera traditions. An appendix includes two application essays (written by Sally), which will provide practical assistance for readers interested in applying. The book also provides a postscript section in which the Botzlers are more forthcoming about the challenges they faced. The most significant setback concerned wildlife biologist Rick’s unexpected shift in responsibilities: “Rick’s efforts to encourage the incorporation of the scientific method and field research projects were met with strong resistance. This, along with Rick’s limited Spanish skills, ultimately resulted in his being ‘reassigned’ to projects different from those he’d originally expected.” Despite such disappointments, they achieved success with their diverse projects, and it’s easy to admire them for taking on this work with dedication and enthusiasm.
A memoir that will particularly interest baby boomers considering the Peace Corps for extended volunteer service.Pub Date: July 28, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-5127-9714-5
Page Count: 122
Publisher: Westbow Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 2, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
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
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