Customer Reviews

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

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4 star:		(1)
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What is so remarkable about these stories is how well they deliver the absolute essence, not of a Peace Corps "experience," but of the cultures of the host countries. If there are 130,000 RPCVs in this country, why haven't we had more of an effect on attitudes and policies? I think we can by putting this book on our family coffee tables and night stands, in our town libraries, and in our shcools. With today's economy, it is a wonderful gift­for families, friends, and teachers

This collection of 13 short stories written by Peace Corps volunteers with advanced degrees and American ways of seeing social and economic life, is full of unexpected insights. As the stories unfold, one understands just a bit better why a fish farmer gives away most of his hard-earned first harvest; how school lessons reinforced with beatings are still considered the only way to make students learn in one village; how young tribal Africans, with good humor, put a young volunteer in his place with an elaborate version of a rural snipe hunt; why one older volunteer chose to remain permanently

The collection contains a surprising amount of humor for a book grounded in cultrual turmoil, global poverty, linguistic confusion, and a decent amount of tragedy. . .a crash course in cultural relativism while capturing the pecular sights, struggles, and smells of distant places

"Pretty exotic" will be many a reader's conclusion, but so will "thoroughly human," i.e., funny, raffish, tragic, cruel, . . this is a powerful, engrossing collection

These are real writers at work, who seem to have observed so keenly the arcana of the cultures they livd in, and written it all down, that you can begin to feel overwhelmed by the meticulousness of it, and the nearly unrelenting solemnity. It's a new sub-sub-genre­Peace Corps naturalism. . .Like Peace Corps life, this valuable book packs a lot into a little space

The writers share the belief that people of different cultures can come together in mutual appreciation and respect for their differences, though the experiences they describe are at times wrenching. A superb collection, the book captures the Peace Corps spirit insightfully

It was with mixed feelings that I picked up the very handsome collection of stories, "From the Center of the Earth," more or less curious about what I would find inside, how many tales of espionage, how much ideology, how much dissillusionment. I found none of the above. The 13 stories in this anthology, some fiction, some autobiography, are amazingly apolitical, as though there were no larger picture within which the volunteers were operating. The focus is consistently on individual relationships from which certain facts of culture, politics and economics can be gleaned. . . this book is definitely an example of a whole that is significantly greater than the sum of its parts. Any one of these stories taken alone or in another context would be read as a unique, individual work, pathetic or ironic or tragic or simply mundane, and would be judged on its own literary merits. But put it in the context of 12 other stories, each one with the same tincture of the pathetic, ironic, tragic and mundane, and what you have is exponential: the experiences related in the stories start building up, one after the other, start accumulating force and speed so that by the time I read the last offering, "Ramon," I felt that I was being hit not by one speeding locomotive, but by 13. This is the result of editorial skill in shaping the whole. The arrangement is not alphabetical by author, or geographical, or chronological, but is designed like some sort of amazing puzzle that doesn't come together until the last piece slips in. By the end you know you have been carefully guided on a specific journey, you have been taken slowly and meticulously from stage to stage, you have been offered water in the form of comic relief when necessary, you have been shown a glimpse of something here, something there, certain information about cultural misunderstanding, personal disconnection, human impotence and tragedy has been offered to you, and so by the time the last writer, Moritz Thomsen, is introduced to you, you're ready for him

Geraldine Kennedy's choices cannot be faulted. I don't know of any other volume that has captured the Peace Corps spirit as insightfully as "From the Center of the Earth."

The stories may or may not be based on real incidents. It doesn't matter. The are based on real experience and knowledge that can come only from living with the people one writes about. The stories paint portraits of people worth knowing and ways of life to marvel at. We discover that survival takes many forms, but no matter how different the way of life, the human element remains basically the same. People love, laugh, fight, struggle and play whereever they are. . . Because these people write so well, the countries come alive for the reader: jungles, beaches, savannahs and villages. The natural beauty is as real as the grit and grime of village living. The best thing about reading these tales is that you feel as if you've been on a world journey, sampling the lives of people much different from yourself - but much the same, as well

The stories in this collection are exceptionally well-written, and the book is brilliantly edited and beautifully printed. The sometimes humorous and sometimes tragic encounters between Americans and their Third World counterparts will remind Mennonites of MCC stories. This book is required reading for everyone considering cross-cultural service. (The WMSC Voice is a publication of the Women's Missionary and Service Commission of the Mennonite Church.