Exploring Top Books of Shelfari

River Town: Two Years on the Yangtze

by Peter Hessler

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... (more)

Dear Exile : The True Story of Two Friends Separated (for a Year) by an Ocean

Dear Exile : The True Story of Two Friends Separated (for a Year) by an Ocean

by Hilary Liftin

A funny and moving story told through the letters of two women nurturing a friendship as they are separated by distance, experience, and time.

Nine Hills to Nambonkaha: Two Years in the Heart of an African Village

Nine Hills to Nambonkaha: Two Years in the Heart of an African Village

by Sarah Erdman

The village of Nambonkaha in the Ivory Coast is a place where electricity hasn’t yet arrived, where sorcerers still conjure magic, where the tok-tok sound of women pounding corn fills the morning air like a drumbeat. As Sarah Erdman enters the social fold of the village as a Peace Corps volunteer, she finds that Nambonkaha is also a place where AIDS threatens and poverty is constant, where women suffer the... (more)

Chasing the Sea: Lost Among the Ghosts of Empire in Central Asia

Chasing the Sea: Lost Among the Ghosts of Empire in Central Asia

by Tom Bissell

In 1960, the Aral Sea was the size of Lake Michigan: a huge body of water in the deserts of Central Asia. By 1996, when Tom Bissell arrived in Uzbekistan as a naïve Peace Corps volunteer, disastrous Soviet irrigation policies had shrunk the sea to a third its size. Bissell lasted only a few months before complications forced him to return home, but he had already become obsessed with this beautiful, brutal land. ... (more)

Living Poor: A Peace Corps Chronicle

by Moritz Thomsen

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 made "Living Poor" a classic. 'Hilariously funny at times, grimly sad at others and elavened with perceptive insights into the ways of the people and with breathtaking... (more)

My Secret History

by Paul Theroux

Brilliantly written, erotically charged, My Secret History is Paul Theroux's tour de force. It is the story of Andre Parent, a writer, a world traveller, a lover of every kind of woman he chances to meet in a life as varied as a man can lead. It begins with his days as a Massachusetts altar boy, when his first furtive sexual encounter introduces him to the thrills of leading a double life. As a teenaged lifeguard,... (more)

American Taboo

A Murder in the Peace Corps

by Philip Weiss

TABOO (n) <Tongan tabu> 1: a prohibition against touching, saying, or doing something for fear of immediate harm from a supernatural force. In 1975, thirty-three Peace Corps volunteers landed in the island nation of Tonga. It was an exotic place -- men wearing grass skirts, coconut-thatched huts, pigs wandering the crushed-coral streets -- governed by strange and exacting rules of conduct. The... (more)

Village of Waiting

by George Packer

Now restored to print with a new Foreword by Philip Gourevitch and an Afterword by the author, this book is a frank, moving, and vivid account of contemporary life in West Africa. Stationed as a Peace Corps instructor in the village of Lavié (the name means "wait a little more") in tiny and underdeveloped Togo, Packer reveals his own schooling at the hands of an unforgettable array of townspeople--peasants,... (more)

A Life Inspired: Tales of Peace Corps Service

A Life Inspired: Tales of Peace Corps Service

Twenty-eight first-person stories, recount the unique experience of being a Peace Corps Volunteer. Compelling, inspiring, sometimes funny, often poignant, these stories represent the breadth of Peace Corps work, the countries it serves, and its Volunteer diversity. Together, the stories reflect the adventure, the cross-cultural exchange, the personal growth, and the deep friendships forged as part of the Peace... (more)

First Comes Love, Then Comes Malaria: How a Peace Corps Poster Boy Won My Heart and a Third World Adventure Changed My Life

First Comes Love, Then Comes Malaria: How a Peace Corps Poster Boy Won My Heart and a Third World Adventure Changed My Life

by Eve Brown-Waite

In this laugh-out-loud funny memoir, a pampered city girl falls head over little black heels in love with a Peace Corps poster boy and follows him —literally–to the ends of the earth. Eve Brown always thought she would join the Peace Corps someday, although she secretly worried about life without sushi, frothy coffee drinks and air conditioning. But with college diploma in hand, it was time to put up or shut... (more)

Monique and the Mango Rains: Two Years with a Midwife in Mali

Monique and the Mango Rains: Two Years with a Midwife in Mali

by Kris Holloway

What is it like to live and work in a remote corner of the world and befriend a courageous midwife who breaks traditional roles? Monique and the Mango Rains: Two Years with a Mali Midwife is the inspiring story of Monique Dembele, an accidental midwife who became a legend, and Kris Holloway, the young Peace Corps volunteer who became her closest confidante. In a small village in Mali, West Africa, Monique saved... (more)

Americans Do Their Business Abroad: The Peace Corps Latrine Reader

Americans Do Their Business Abroad: The Peace Corps Latrine Reader

Herein reside seventeen stories (and one poem) written by Peace Corps Volunteers from across the generations and across the planet. Such writing often brings expectations for a certain type of book (heartwarming, uplifting, nice). Many books give you that experience. And we like those books. They are good books. The world needs those books. This is not that book. Americans Do Their Business Abroad is a collection... (more)

Joe & Azat

by Jesse Lonergan

Joe is an American in the strange land of Turkmenistan who finds a good friend in Azat, a Turkmen dreamer whose optimism knows no bounds. With tales of doomed desert cab rides, nights of endless vodka shots, unlikely Turkmen business schemes, and secret girlfriends, Lonergan captures not only the bizarreness of living in a country where the president for life launches copies of his poetry books into space, outlaws... (more)

We Shared The Peeled Orange: The Letters of "Papa Louis" from the Thai-Cambodian Border Refugee Camps 1981-1993

We Shared The Peeled Orange: The Letters of "Papa Louis" from the Thai-Cambodian Border Refugee Camps 1981-1993

by Louis E. Braile

After Pol Pot's reign of genocide in Cambodia and the invasion of the Vietnamese in the 1970s, many Cambodians fled to Thailand with little more than the clothes on their backs. Moved by their plight (and encouraged by his daughter, a nurse), Braile left his home and Washington state practice to work as a missionary doctor in Cambodian refugee camps on the Thai-Cambodian border from 1983-1991. Braile's letters... (more)

The Unheard: A Memoir of Deafness and Africa

The Unheard: A Memoir of Deafness and Africa

by Josh Swiller

A young man’s quest to reconcile his deafness in an unforgiving world leads to a remarkable sojourn in a remote African village that pulsates with beauty and violence These are hearing aids. They take the sounds of the world and amplify them.” Josh Swiller recited this speech to himself on the day he arrived in Mununga, a dusty village on the shores of Lake Mweru. Deaf since a young age, Swiller spent his... (more)

From the Center of the Earth: Stories Out of the Peace Corps

From the Center of the Earth: Stories Out of the Peace Corps

White Man's Grave

by Richard Dooling

When Peace Corps volunteer Michael Killigan goes missing in West Africa, his father Randall and his best friend Boone Westfall begin separate quests to find him. Randall, a bankruptcy lawyer, is the warlord of his world, a shark in a fishbowl, exercising power with mad, relentless, hilarious glee; Boone, an American innocent abroad, journeys to the African bush, protected by the twin charms of the passport and... (more)

The Ponds of Kalambayi

by Mike Tidwell

A hilarious and wrenching memoir from a peace Corps volunteer in Zaire.

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