Book Reviews

So, I have a feeling that the average PCV (Peace Corps Volunteer) dramatically out reads the average American citizen. I don't have any statistics to back this up, but I'm basing this on personal experience, discussions with other PCV friends and the much loved PCV library, which is full of all kinds of fun things from Eneagram personality books to political books to books on animal husbandry.

Here are some things I have read.

Infinite Jest- David Foster Wallace
This book is fantastically zany and perfect for a person with a lot of time on her hands. I've only gotten half way through it, because it is 1100 pages long, 200 pages of that being footnotes. It's sort of a futuristic yet oddly vaguely plausible novel about the ends to which the American obsession for entertainment and escapism led. The four nouns to describe it most simply would be: tennis, addiction, Canadian separatism and film making, but that hardly begins to describe the crazy vortex that is this book. Basically, the nerd equivalent of a wild kegger in enjoyability.

Confessions of an Economic Hitman- John Perkins
This book really irked me, mostly because Perkins' writing style was so obnoxiously bad and self aggrandizing even when he was trying to be self deprecating. His writing style made me especially annoyed because he claimed he was good at his job because he was such a good writer. OK, buddy. Basically its his life story about working for a Haliburton type construction firm as an economic development international big wig and how he basically played around with econometrics to get third world countries massively into debt and reap billions of $s. Maybe I'm too cynical of a person, but every time he would be shocked a some jerky thing his corporation did, I was like,"Yeah, this is surprising why??" Also every time he would be like "And then I had another liaison with a very beautiful woman" I wanted to punch him in the face even more. Not misanthropic, I swear.

Madness and Civilization-Michel Foucault
This was a reread, although I was far more impressed with it this time, perhaps another example of my great enjoyment of classic literature read in a semi- deranged state, like the time I read Crime and Punishment after having my wisdom teeth out and was obsessed with it...I finished rereading this on the bus at 6 am after a slow and bumpy overnight bus ride on a former school bus...I'm considering starting a 12 step program on "how to make yourself completely unrelatable to 99% of the world's population". Step 5 is "Read Foucault on public buses in a foreign country."

I digressed...So, Foucault was a genius. He makes you look at things that are so ingrained in modern Western culture, yet so obviously shaped by power relations with the state (the rules and tabooes governing sex, attitudes towards madness, imprisonment) and enlightens their historical roots, with an erudite simplicity that is maddeningly original: you feel stupid for not having ever thought deeply about these sort of things before, yet happy for having had them opened up and brought into the light.

Chasing the Sea: Lost among the Ghosts of Empire in Central Asia- Tom Bissell
This is an awesome book. It shouldn't be, because it is sort of lacking in a plot, but Tom Bissell is such a fantastic writer that he brings the complexities of Central Asian history to life in a way that is beautiful, tragic, haunting, enticing, and obnoxiously self righteous/snarky but just enough to be funny. The plot of the book features Tom Bissell, a former PCV who "early terminated" going back to Uzbekistan, the country where he served, to go to the Aral Sea, arguably the worst ecological disaster in human history, to write about it. Not that much of the book is even about the Aral Sea, but it's still fascinating. Especially if you find learning about environmental disasters and dictatorships interesting.

In the Valley of the Mist: Kashmir: One Family in a Changing World- Justine Hardy
Justine Hardy writes well and does a pretty good job making the intricacies of Kashmir accessible to the average reader. Kashmir is fascinating, because it's so messed up and trapped between forces bigger than itself, and so under-reported. I had the pleasure of meeting the author twice during the EPIIC Program last year. She's a powerful speaker. I had a lot of skepticism about the quality of her aid work, particularly as portrayed in this book, but she makes an excellent case in person, particularly for her current projects which focus on holistic approaches to mental health in protracted conflict situations. Here's a powerful video of hers from the Oslo Freedom Forum, a human rights conference in, you guessed it, Oslo, Norway.

My Happy Days in Hell- Gyorgy Faludy
The story of Hungary poet Gyorgy Faludy's (who I had never heard of but felt like I should have) travels all over the globe escaping the terrors of World War II and then walking into communist Hungary's trap out of his intense desire to return to his homeland. Half the time you're reading the book, you kind of want to hate Faludy for being such an intellectual snob, and then you reflect on what he's been through, that his fierce intellectualism basically kept him alive, and it's jaw dropping.

Cien Años de Soledad- Gabriel Garcia Marquez
To say I read Cien Años de Soledad in Spanish is true, to say I understood all of it, less true. I understood most of it, although I was a bit stymied by vocabulary I didn't know, lots characters with basically the same names, and sentences featuring creative play on time:
"Many years later, in front of the firing squad, Coronel Aureliano Buedia would remember that long ago afternoon when his father took him to visit the ice."

Even if later generations of Latin American writers (the McOndo movement for example) have been frustrated by the legacy of Magical Realism for creating an image of Latin America as a fantastical rural backwater, the literary contributions of Marquez are pretty undeniable. Definitely a good read.

A History of Nicaragua- Clifford L. Statten
A pretty good history as histories go...dry,but thorough, and generally straight shooting about who has responsibility for what, unlike other leftist histories of Nicaragua (cough cough Thomas Walker's In the Shadow of the Eagle) which just want to blame the US for every bad thing that has ever happened to Nicaragua, which is nearly as insulting and agency robbing to Nicaraguans as the US' habit of intervening in their affairs every 5 minutes.

1Q84- Haruki Murakami
This story is spellbinding. Like most Murakami, the plot is fantastically bizarre and would be off-putting were it not so impossible to put down. We're talking about a love story with magical creatures, multiple worlds, urban disillusionment and isolation, a contract killer, a vaguely political cult, and weird, weird sex.