CRPCA Book Club

Columbia River Peace Corps Association

Serving our community. Engaging the world.

Book Club

Upcoming Books

Cover Image	Book & Discussion	Review(s)	Read It!
	Meyer, Michael: *The Last Days of Old Beijing: Life in the Vanishing Backstreets of a City Transformed* (2008) Wednesday, June 13, 2012 6:30-8:00 pm Gather at the home of Liz Samuels, 3739 SW Hillside Dr in Portland, 503-228-7706. Feel free to bring snacks to share.	© Publishers Weekly: Just in time for the Summer Olympics in Beijing, the Old City's narrow lanes and shops are being bulldozed and their residents displaced to make way for Wal-Marts, shopping centers and high-rise apartments. Part memoir, part history, part travelogue and part call to action, journalist Meyer's elegant first book yearns for old Beijing and mourns the loss of an older way of life. Having lived for two years in one of Beijing's oldest hutongs--mazes of lanes and courtyards bordered by single-story houses--Meyer chronicles the threat urban planning poses not only to the ancient history buried within these neighborhoods but also to the people of the hutong. The hutong, he says, builds community in a way that glistening glass and steel buildings cannot. His 81-year-old neighbor, whom he calls the "Widow," had always been safe because neighbors watched out for her, as she watched out for others: the book opens with a delightful scene in which the Widow, a salty character who calls Meyer "Little Plumblossom," brings him unsolicited dumplings for his breakfast. The ironies of the reconstruction of Beijing are clear in the building of Safe and Sound Boulevard, which, Meyer tells us, is "neither safe nor sound. "Meyer's powerful book is to Beijing what Jane Jacobs's The Death and Life of Great American Cities was to New York City.	Libraries Clackamas Co Ft Vancouver Multnomah Co Washington Co Vendors Powell's Amazon B&N
	Urbani Hiltebrand, Ellen: When I Was Elena* (2006) *RPCV Guatemala Tuesday, July 10, 2012 6:30-8:00 pm Gather at the home of Ellen Urbani Gass (the book's author!), 1730 SW Schaeffer Rd in West Linn. When the driveway splits at a Y, take the left fork. The gate should be open if you arrive on time, but call 503-701-6609 if you need help. We'll be outside, so bring a folding lawn/camp chair or blanket to sit on. From the top of Pete's Mountain, we'll have 180-degree views of the Cascades, the coast range, and the valley floor. Feel free to bring snacks to share.	© Publishers Weekly: In 1991, Hiltebrand, then 22, jettisoned her Southern belle sorority life for two years in rural Guatemala, armed with her dog, fluency in Spanish and a well-grounded blend of will and pluck ("National Geographic lied," she declares upon arrival). In the country's crushing poverty and rampant hazards, along with the worshipful envy Hiltebrand elicits as a "gringa," the author finds an unexpected lode of humor that she mines to impressive effect, gently but not jeeringly. She records events with unflinching precision, leavened with an amiable sense of the absurd--as when a crone blithely steals Hiltebrand's mattress, which is imbued with new value by a white woman's touch. Even the kindness extended to her is riddled with poignant irony, as a neighbor slaughters her chickens to feed the author's ailing dog. The country's more menacing figures--lewd men, including a would-be rapist--are introduced without histrionics, as products of a culture viewed with clear-eyed, anthropological interest. Hiltebrand's travelogue is intercut with the quietly powerful life stories of the native women she befriends, and the tectonic shifts in perspective create a rich mosaic of culture and character. Though in spots Hiltebrand's prose feels thickly applied, her animated voice reliably shines through.	Libraries Clackamas Co Ft Vancouver Multnomah Co Washington Co Vendors Powell's Amazon B&N
	Holloway, Kris: Monique and the Mango Rains: Two Years with a Midwife in Mali* (2007) *RPCV Mali Tuesday, September 11, 2012 6:30-8:00 pm Gather at the home of Patrice Hudson, 4222 SE Morrison St in Portland, 503-866-7020. Feel free to bring snacks to share.	© Publishers Weekly: This tender, revelatory memoir recalls the two years Holloway spent as an impressionable Peace Corps volunteer in the remote village of Nampossela in Mali, West Africa. It centers on her close friendship with Monique, the village's overburdened midwife. When Holloway (now a nonprofit development specialist) arrived in Nampossela in 1989, she was 22; Monique was only two years her senior. Yet Monique, barely educated, working without electricity, running water, ambulances or emergency rooms, was solely responsible for all births in her village, tending malnourished and overworked pregnant women in her makeshift birthing clinic. With one of the highest rates of maternal death in the world, these Malian women sometimes had to work right up until and directly after giving birth and had no means of contraception. Holloway especially noted Monique's status as an underpaid female whose male family members routinely claimed much of her pay. Monique shared her emotional life with Holloway, who in turn campaigned for her rights at work and raised funds for her struggling clinic. Holloway's moving account vividly presents the tragic consequences of inadequate prenatal and infant health care in the developing world and will interest all those concerned about the realities of women's lives outside the industrialized world.	Libraries Clackamas Co Ft Vancouver Multnomah Co Washington Co Vendors Powell's Amazon B&N
	Demick, Barbara: *Nothing to Envy: Ordinary Lives in North Korea* (2010) Tuesday, October 16, 2012 6:30-8:00 pm Gather at the home of Holt Williams, 4106 SE Franklin St in Portland, 503-236-8653. Feel free to bring snacks to share.	© Booklist: In spite of the strict restrictions on foreign press, award-winning journalist Demick caught telling glimpses of just how surreal and mournful life is in North Korea. Her chilling impressions of a dreary, muffled, and depleted land are juxtaposed with a uniquely to-the-point history of how North Korea became an industrialized Communist nation supported by the Soviet Union and China and ruled by Kim Il Sung, then collapsed catastrophically into poverty, darkness, and starvation under the dictator's son, Kim Jong Il. Demick's bracing chronicle of the horrific consequences of decades of brutality provide the context for the wrenching life stories of North Korean defectors who confided in Demick. Mi-ran explains that even though her "tainted blood" (her father was a South Korean POW) kept her apart from the man she loved, she managed to become a teacher, only to watch her starving students waste away. Dr. Kim Ki-eum could do nothing to help her dying patients. Mrs. Song, a model citizen, was finally forced to face cruel facts. Strongly written and gracefully structured, Demick's potent blend of personal narratives and piercing journalism vividly and evocatively portrays courageous individuals and a tyrannized state within a saga of unfathomable suffering punctuated by faint glimmers of hope.	Libraries Clackamas Co Ft Vancouver Multnomah Co Washington Co Vendors Powell's Amazon B&N
	Herrera, Susana: Mango Elephants in the Sun: How Life in an African Village Let Me Be in My Skin* (1999) *RPCV Cameroon Tuesday, November 13, 2012 6:30-8:00 pm Gather at the home of Linda Centurion, 3940 SE 47th Ave in Portland, 503-788-7366. Feel free to bring snacks to share.	© Publishers Weekly: In 1992, Herrera set off for Northern Cameroon, where she spent two years as a volunteer teacher in the Peace Corps. While her Navajo and Spanish origins would make her a person of color in the U.S., the villagers of Guidiguis perceived her as a white woman or nasara, a term she soon realized had more to do with American culture and privilege than with skin color. Guidiguis, she found, was both modern and retrograde. The king and the mayor both had televisions and luxury cars, her neighbor bought a CD player and most of the residents appeared to have electricity, though it functioned erratically. Still, most of the daily workwashing, cooking, carrying water, grinding millet, making clothes, etc., was done by hand, and by women, which often disturbed Herrera. A fine storyteller, she paces her account so that her past in California slowly emerges (it turns out she has left an abusive marriage) between such adventures as eating termites and finding ingenious ways to circumvent the schools tradition of corporal punishment. Though the occasional bits of magical realism and mediocre poetry feel forced, the prose is lively overall. The combination of Herreras spunk, her romantic interest in a local doctor and her clever response to the political tensions involved in a teachers strike make for an absorbing read. Clearly Herrera knows how to balance the bad with the good. Its no wonder that by the time her stay ended, many of her new friends in Guidiguis saw her departure as a tragedy.	Libraries Clackamas Co Multnomah Co Vendors Powell's Amazon B&N
	Stevenson, Seth: *Grounded: A Down to Earth Journey Around the World* (2010) Tuesday, December 11, 2012 6:30-8:00 pm Gather at the home of Bill Stein, 4308 SE Lexington St in Portland, 503-830-0817. Feel free to bring snacks to share.	© Booklist: Anyone familiar with Jules Verne's Around the World in Eighty Days will already know the basic premise of Stephenson's book: an around-the-world voyage in which we visit strange lands, meet unusual people, and have interesting adventures. Unlike Phileas Fogg, however, Stevenson and his traveling companion (his girlfriend, Rebecca) have no deadline: they can take as long as they want to make their way around the globe. But, like Fogg, they intend to stay earthbound the entire time (his balloon trip wasn't on the original agenda), eschewing airplanes for cargo freighters, buses, bicycles, and other terrestrial forms of transportation. It's a very entertaining story, told in a spirited, engaging style (the author is an experienced travel writer). While falling in the very contemporary category of "extreme travel," this entertaining account manages to combine a hip modern approach with a charming nostalgic feel. A must for armchair travelers.	Libraries Clackamas Co Multnomah Co Washington Co Vendors Powell's Amazon B&N

Past Books

Cover Image	Book & Discussion	Review(s)	Read It!
	Ansary, Tamim: *Destiny Disrupted: A History of the World Through Islamic Eyes* (2009) April 2010	The Oregonian (May 8, 2009)	Libraries Clackamas Co Ft Vancouver Multnomah Co Washington Co Vendors Powell's Amazon B&N
	Stewart, Rory: *The Places in Between* (2006) May 2010	© Booklist: Stewart, a resident of Scotland, has written for the New York Times Magazine and the London Review of Books, and he is a former fellow at Harvard's John F. Kennedy School of Government. In January 2002, having just spent 16 months walking across Iran, Pakistan, India, and Nepal, Stewart began a walk across Afghanistan from Herat to Kabul. Although the Taliban had been ousted several weeks earlier, Stewart was launching a journey through a devastated, unsettled, and unsafe landscape. The recounting of that journey makes for an engrossing, surprising, and often deeply moving portrait of the land and the peoples who inhabit it. Stewart relates his encounters with ordinary villagers, security officials, students, displaced Taliban officials, foreign-aid workers, and rural strongmen, and his descriptions of the views and attitudes of those he lived with are presented in frank, unvarnished terms. Nation building in Afghanistan remains a work in progress, and this work should help those who wish to understand the complexities of that task.	Libraries Clackamas Co Ft Vancouver Multnomah Co Washington Co Vendors Powell's Amazon B&N
	Adichie, Chimamanda Ngozi: *Half of a Yellow Sun* (2006) June 2010	© Publishers Weekly: When the Igbo people of eastern Nigeria seceded in 1967 to form the independent nation of Biafra, a bloody, crippling three-year civil war followed. That period in African history is captured with haunting intimacy in this artful page-turner from Nigerian novelist Adichie (Purple Hibiscus). Adichie tells her profoundly gripping story primarily through the eyes and lives of Ugwu, a 13-year-old peasant houseboy who survives conscription into the raggedy Biafran army, and twin sisters Olanna and Kainene, who are from a wealthy and well-connected family. Tumultuous politics power the plot, and several sections are harrowing, particularly passages depicting the savage butchering of Olanna and Kainene's relatives. But this dramatic, intelligent epic has its lush and sultry side as well: rebellious Olanna is the mistress of Odenigbo, a university professor brimming with anticolonial zeal; business-minded Kainene takes as her lover fair-haired, blue-eyed Richard, a British expatriate come to Nigeria to write a book about Igbo-Ukwu art.and whose relationship with Kainene nearly ruptures when he spends one drunken night with Olanna. This is a transcendent novel of many descriptive triumphs, most notably its depiction of the impact of war's brutalities on peasants and intellectuals alike. It's a searing history lesson in fictional form, intensely evocative and immensely absorbing.	Libraries Clackamas Co Ft Vancouver Multnomah Co Washington Co Vendors Powell's Amazon B&N
	Chilson, Peter: Riding the Demon: On the Road in West Africa* (1999) *RPCV Niger July 2010 Participating in our discussion was CRPCA's Peter Chilson, the book's author.	© Publishers Weekly: In this vivid exploration of road culture in the West African nation of Niger, Chilson describes a crucial aspect of African culture as a whole: the bush taxi, or "taxi brousse." A year spent taking journeys in this most common form of transportation in Africa leads Chilson further inside modern Africa than an earnest anthropologist would get, not least because of the danger involved. The people of West Africa abhor an empty Peugeot 504. The rickety old station wagons with balding tires, no windows and engines held together by a wing and a prayer gather at chaotic motor parks where they wait until at least 10 passengers are crammed aboard before taking off. These bush taxis are the great social leveler, since people from all walks of life use them. Auto accidents, horrendous and frequent, are a leading cause of death in Africa. Stationed along all routes are "checkpoints" manned by aggressive soldiers who expect bribes, the cost of which is factored in to the passengers' fare. Little wonder that a fatalistic belief in the "demons" of the road dominates the driversAa set of beliefs that also draws in the author, whose own fear is assuaged by amulets and, on occasion, numb withdrawal. There is an unrelenting quality to the excellent descriptive writing, appropriate perhaps because of the unrelenting life, but readers will hunger for more humor and better characterizations of the people the author met. Riding the Demon received the Associated Writing Programs award for creative nonfiction.	Libraries Clackamas Co Multnomah Co Washington Co Vendors Powell's Amazon B&N
	Davis, Wade: *Light at the Edge of the World: A Journey Through the Realm of Vanishing Cultures* (2007) September 2010	© Booklist: Ethnobotanist and anthropologist Davis, author of One River (1996) and Shadows in the Sun (1998), has traveled the world for 25 years, pen and camera in hand, to study the myriad ways indigenous people live in physical and spiritual intimacy with the natural world. Driven by curiosity and a profound respect for the "ethnosphere," humanity's diverse "thoughts, beliefs, myths, and intuitions," Davis has dwelled among the people of the Arctic, the Amazon, Haiti, Kenya, Borneo, Australia, and Tibet, learning their modes of being, cosmologies, and botanical expertise. His quest has rendered him acutely sensitive to the connection between biodiversity and cultural diversity, and as he portrays in pellucid language and magnificent photographs healers, shamans, hunters, and men, women, and children adept at survival in the most demanding of wildernesses, he decries the rampant environmental destruction and globalization that are decimating indigenous cultures, thus depriving future generations of their knowledge, wisdom, and unique perspectives. Aesthetically powerful in both word and image, this essential volume opens readers' eyes and imaginations to the wonders of the earth and humanity's varied "insights into the very nature of existence," a bounty and legacy we simply cannot do without.	Libraries Clackamas Co Ft Vancouver Multnomah Co Washington Co Vendors Powell's Amazon B&N
	Le Breton, Binka: *Where the Road Ends: A Home in the Brazilian Rainforest* (2010) October 2010 Participating in our discussion was CRPCA's Blake Schmidt, who worked with Binka Le Breton 's Brazil-based NGO, Iracambi.	© Publishers Weekly: This book reveals all the enchantment of the rainforest, as well as its mysteries and dangers. The author and her agricultural economist husband moved to Brazil twenty years ago to take over an abandoned farm in a beautiful but remote locale. Le Breton's story the challenges and joys they faced adapting to the community and working to realize their dream of bringing environmental awakening to the region through the establishment of the Iracambi Rainforest Research Center. Her tale has everything, from bandits to insane elections to horribly delayed projects to the artificial insemination of the cows. The cast of characters, colorful in the extreme, includes a squatter cowboy who can fix almost anything, neighbors involved in vendettas, homeless bridegrooms, and women who take sewing seminars in the farmhouse kitchen hoping to make money from the new skills, in spite of the prevailing attitude that a woman's place was in the home. In spite of myriad setbacks, there is tremendous goodwill. "Most Brazilians spent their salary the day they received it, and most shopkeepers put up their prices accordingly. If you were quick off the mark you might find an item in the supermarket going at last week's price, but the supermarket staff tended to be quicker than you were." Le Breton's can-do attitude and successful gerry-rigging makes her an entertaining MacGyver of the jungle. Also reviewed in the Washington Post, 6/06/2010.	Libraries Clackamas Co Ft Vancouver Multnomah Co Washington Co Vendors Powell's Amazon B&N
	Davis, Matthew: When Things Get Dark: A Mongolian Winter's Tale* (2010) *RPCV Mongolia November 2010	© Booklist: In 2000, at the age of 23, Davis leaves Chicago, his hometown, to travel to Mongolia to work as a teacher for the Peace Corps. Once he arrives in the small town of Tsetserleg, Davis moves into a ger, the circular tent that will be his home for the next two years, and gets to know the family whose land he is living on. He finds his students difficult to motivate, and a romance with a beautiful Mongolian teacher is heated but brief. After enduring a brutal Mongolian winter and a plague-induced quarantine, Davis finds himself falling into the trap he sees so many Mongolian men around him succumbing to: drinking constantly and giving into violent tendencies. The longer he's in Mongolia, the deeper he falls into depression and ennui, until a violent encounter shakes him into realizing his life has to change. Both a raw personal examination and an insightful look at Mongolian history and culture, Davis' illuminating memoir sheds light on a remote region.	Libraries Ft Vancouver Multnomah Co Washington Co Vendors Powell's Amazon B&N
	Tinker, Irene: *Crossing Centuries: A Road Trip Through Colonial Africa* (2010) December 2010 Participating in our discussion was Irene Tinker, the book's author.	US Ambassador Alan McKee: Irene Tinker's vivid memoir recaptures a pivotal moment, circa 1953, when East Africa was on the road to independence. It dramatizes both how far new nations have come since then and how burdened they remain by ghosts of the past. Her book contains useful history, rigorous political science, and fascinating ethnography, all enhanced by the added dimension of a woman's perspective. But, above all, this is a good story, in the tradition of great African travelogues from James Conrad and Graham Greene to Paul Theroux. Crossing Centuries will warm the hearts of old Africa hands and seize the imagination of readers new to what used to be called the Dark Continent.	Libraries Clackamas Co Ft Vancouver Multnomah Co Washington Co Vendors Powell's Amazon B&N
	Thomsen, Moritz: Living Poor: A Peace Corps Chronicle* (1969) *RPCV Ecuador January 2011	© St. Louis Post-Dispatch: Hilariously funny at times, grimly sad at others and elavened with perceptive insights into the ways of the people and with breathtaking descriptions of the Ecuadorian landscape. Named "best memoir of Peace Corps life in Latin America" by Peace Corps Worldwide in 2009.	Libraries Multnomah Co Washington Co Vendors Powell's Amazon B&N
	Hessler, Peter: River Town: Two Years on the Yangtze* (2001) *RPCV China February 2011 Participating in our discussion was Peter Hessler, the book's author.	© Kirkus Reviews: A two-year sojourn in a small city in central China yields this youthful, gracefully impressionistic portrait of a time and place from newcomer Hessler. In 1996, Hessler reported for his Peace Corps duty to Fuling, a city of some 200,000 souls astride the murky Yangtze River, which cuts through the green and terraced mountains of Sichuan Province. This account is a chronicle of the author's days in Fuling and of a brief summer interlude of travel farther afield. Hessler's writing is unselfconsciously mellow, a lazy pace that works admirably in conjuring up Fuling as a place. There is the gentle knock of the croquet ball in the morning when the court below his window comes to life. There is this river city of steps pressed against hills; there are ridgelines cut with ancient calligraphy and pictographs that disappear under water during the rainy season. There are his students--a poignant, watershed generation who delight him to no end. Big things happen while he is in China (the Three Gorges Project is in full swing and Deng Xiaoping dies), but it is the everyday stuff that is so affecting. The surprise and unpredictability of the townsfolk catch him unawares more than once, he feels the sensitivity of being a foreigner, with all eyes upon him and little cultural abrasions everywhere: "Those were our Opium Wars, quiet and meaningless battles over Chinese and American history, fueled by indirect remarks and careful innuendo." And he loves it, despite the dislocations and frustrations: even the creepy drinking bouts at banquets ("Every banquet has a leader, a sort of alcoholic alpha male") and the relentless mocking of his foreignness by strangers (for, although the Peace Corps is no longer considered a running-dog outfit, foreigners are nonetheless seen as freaks) become sources of nostalgia after a while. A vivid and touching tribute to a place and its people. Named "best [Peace Corps] memoir of Asia" by Peace Corps Worldwide in 2009.	Libraries Clackamas Co Multnomah Co Washington Co Vendors Powell's Amazon B&N
	Bissell, Tom: Chasing the Sea: Lost Among the Ghosts of Empire in Central Asia* (2004) *RPCV Uzbekistan March 2011	© Google: 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 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. Five years later, Bissell convinces a magazine to send him to Central Asia to investigate the Aral Sea's destruction. There, he joins forces with a high-spirited young Uzbek named Rustam, and together they make their often wild way through the ancient cities (Tashkent, Samarkand, Bukhara) of this fascinating but often misunderstood part of the world. Slipping more than once through the clutches of the Uzbek police, who suspect them of crimes ranging from Christian evangelism to heroin smuggling, the two young men develop an unlikely friendship as they journey to the shores of the devastated sea. Along the way, Bissell provides a history of the Uzbeks, recounting their region's long, violent subjugation by despots such as Jenghiz Khan and Joseph Stalin. He conjures the people of Uzbekistan with depth and empathy, and he captures their contemporary struggles to cope with Islamist terrorism, the legacy of totalitarianism, and the profound environmental and human damage wrought by the sea's disappearance. Sometimes hilarious, sometimes powerfully sobering, Chasing the Sea is a gripping portrait of an unfamiliar land and the debut of a gifted young writer.	Libraries Clackamas Co Multnomah Co Washington Co Vendors Powell's Amazon B&N
	Textor, Robert B. (editor): *Cultural Frontiers of the Peace Corps* (1966) April 2011 Participating in our discussion was CRPCA's Bob Textor, the book's editor.	This book is a collection of social science essays assessing the first five years of Peace Corps. It's full of rich material that lends well to discussion by RPCVs from any era. The book was edited by Robert B. Textor, Peace Corps' founding anthropologist. It features a forward by Margaret Mead and scholarly pieces about early Peace Corps activities in Afghanistan, Bolivia, Jamaica, Malaya, Morocco, Nigeria, Peru, the Philippines, Sierra Leone, Somalia, Tanganyika, Thailand, and Tunisia. Bob Textor also invites us to read his 2011 essay, The Peace Corps' "In-Up-Out" Policy: Reflections on How it all Happened.	Libraries Multnomah Co Summit/Worldcat (request with a participating college's library card) Online Stanford University (free download!) Vendor Amazon
	Tidwell, Mike: The Ponds of Kalambayi: An African Sojourn* (1996) *RPCV Congo May 2011	© Amazon: As a Peace Corps volunteer, Mr. Tidwell spent two years in the grasslands of south central Zaire trying to teach the benefits of fish farming in some of the poorest villages on the continent. His task was not easy. One villager was convinced that fish would stock the ponds naturally, since they come to earth in raindrops. Others suspected that the ponds were just another way for whites to exploit black labor. When he finally made headway, the fish farmers gave away nearly half their harvest to relatives, and Tidwell learned one of many powerful lessons: tradition takes precedence over profits. While the tragic poverty and disease faced by the villagers was daunting, Tidwell found that their adherence to heritage and their celebration of tiny triumphs and daily satisfactions revealed a life richer than he had ever known. Named "best Peace Corps memoir of Africa" by Peace Corps Worldwide in 2009.	Libraries Clackamas Co Multnomah Co Washington Co Vendors Powell's Amazon B&N
	Weiner, Eric: *The Geography of Bliss: One Grump's Search for the Happiest Places in the World* (2008) June 2011	© Kirkus Reviews: Part travelogue, part personal-discovery memoir and all sustained delight, this wise, witty ramble reads like Paul Theroux channeling David Sedaris on a particularly good day. Intent on finding the happiest places on Earth and learning what makes them that way, globe-trotting NPR correspondent Weiner discovers some surprises. Money helps, but only to a point; the happiest places tend to be racially homogenous (an unfortunate statistic for multiculturalists); the greatest obstacle to happiness is not poverty or oppression, but envy; breast-enhancement surgery appears to be a good investment, happiness-wise. The author vividly renders happily repressed Switzerland, determinedly tolerant and hedonistic Holland and culturally vibrant Iceland as models of happiness-encouraging environments. (Another surprise: Happiness flourishes in cold climates.) Excursions to Bhutan and India provide a spiritual perspective and underscore the wisdom of low expectations. For contrast, Weiner visits some decidedly unhappy spots: England's dismal Slough ("a showpiece of quiet desperation"); newly rich Qatar, choking on cash but devoid of culture; and miserable Moldova, whose citizens live by an ethos of envy, corruption, vicious self-interest and pleasure in the misfortune of others. The Moldova chapter is the book's funniest-nothing inspires comedy like misfortune and despair. But Weiner writes of the morose Moldovans with affectionate warmth and manages to find something positive to say about the country: The fruits and vegetables are fresh. Americans, despite their wealth and comfort, don't make the top ranks of the world-happiness index-they think too much, work too hard and look for satisfaction inconsumer goods. The author's pronouncements on the nature of happiness are not exactly world-shaking: It depends on cooperative relationships and community; it has spiritual value; it can be attained as a conscious choice. But the author's conclusions are hardly the point-as with all great journeys, getting there is at least half the fun. Fresh and beguiling.	Libraries Clackamas Co Ft Vancouver Multnomah Co Washington Co Vendors Powell's Amazon B&N
	Brooks, Geraldine: *Nine Parts of Desire: The Hidden World of Islamic Women* (1995) September 2011	© Goodreads: Geraldine Brooks spent two years as a Middle East news correspondent, covering the death of Khomeini and the like. She also learned a lot about what it's like for Islamic women today. Brooks' book is exceedingly well-done--she knows her Islamic lore and traces the origins of today's practices back to Mohammed's time. Personable and very readable, Brooks takes us through the women's back door entrance of the Middle East for an unusual and provocative view.	Libraries Clackamas Co Ft Vancouver Multnomah Co Washington Co Vendors Powell's Amazon B&N
	Kristof, Nicholas D. and Sheryl WuDunn: *Half the Sky: Turning Oppression into Opportunity for Women Worldwide* (2009) October 2011	© Publishers Weekly: New York Times columnist Kristof and his wife, WuDunn, a former Times reporter, make a brilliantly argued case for investing in the health and autonomy of women worldwide. More girls have been killed in the last fifty years, precisely because they were girls, than men were killed in all the wars of the twentieth century, they write, detailing the rampant gendercide in the developing world, particularly in India and Pakistan. Far from merely making moral appeals, the authors posit that it is impossible for countries to climb out of poverty if only a fraction of women (9% in Pakistan, for example) participate in the labor force. China's meteoric rise was due to women's economic empowerment: 80% of the factory workers in the Guangdong province are female; six of the 10 richest self-made women in the world are Chinese. The authors reveal local women to be the most effective change agents: The best role for Americans... isn't holding the microphone at the front of the rally but writing the checks, an assertion they contradict in their unnecessary profiles of American volunteers finding compensations for the lack of shopping malls and Netflix movies in making a difference abroad.	Libraries Clackamas Co Ft Vancouver Multnomah Co Washington Co Vendors Powell's Amazon B&N
	Troost, J. Maarten: *The Sex Lives of Cannibals: Adrift in the Equatorial Pacific* (2004) November 2011	© Publishers Weekly: At 26, Troost followed his wife to Kiribati, a tiny island nation in the South Pacific. Virtually ignored by the rest of humanity (its erstwhile colonial owners, the Brits, left in 1979), Kiribati is the kind of place where dolphins frolic in lagoons, days end with glorious sunsets and airplanes might have to circle overhead because pigs occupy the island's sole runway. Troost's wife was working for an international nonprofit; the author himself planned to hang out and maybe write a literary masterpiece. But Kiribati wasn't quite paradise. It was polluted, overpopulated and scorchingly sunny (Troost could almost feel his freckles mutating into something "interesting and tumorous"). The villages overflowed with scavengers and recently introduced, nonbiodegradable trash. And the Kiribati people seemed excessively hedonistic. Yet after two years, Troost and his wife felt so comfortable, they were reluctant to return home. Troost is a sharp, funny writer, richly evoking the strange, day-by-day wonder that became his life in the islands. One night, he's doing his best funky chicken with dancing Kiribati; the next morning, he's on the high seas contemplating a toilet extending off the boat's stern (when the ocean was rough, he learns, it was like using a bidet). Troost's chronicle of his sojourn in a forgotten world is a comic masterwork of travel writing and a revealing look at a culture clash.	Libraries Clackamas Co Ft Vancouver Multnomah Co Washington Co Vendors Powell's Amazon B&N
	Fonseca, Isabel: *Bury Me Standing: The Gypsies and Their Journey* (1996) December 2011	© Library Journal: Traveling as a journalist, Fonseca stayed with a number of Gypsy families in Eastern Europe between 1991 and 1995. Through her experiences with them, study of the scholarship about them, and interviews with leading figures, she has produced a contemporary account of their status, incorporating details of their society, culture, and history. Her work portrays their commitment to tribal traditions and adherence to ritual and offers good insights, particularly into women's lives. The author regards Gypsies as "an ancient scapegoat" who survive through their traditions and a collective denial of their mistreatment by outsiders, including the Germans during World War II. The author details the discrimination that has kept the Gypsies, now often called Roma, from development of an identity and acceptance by the international community.	Libraries Clackamas Co Ft Vancouver Multnomah Co Washington Co Vendors Powell's Amazon B&N
	Diamond, Jared: *Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies* (2005) January 2012	© Amazon: Jared Diamond presents the biologist's answer: geography, demography, and ecological happenstance. Diamond evenhandedly reviews human history on every continent since the Ice Age at a rate that emphasizes only the broadest movements of peoples and ideas. Yet his survey is binocular: one eye has the rather distant vision of the evolutionary biologist, while the other eye--and his heart--belongs to the people of New Guinea, where he has done field work for more than 30 years.	Libraries Clackamas Co Ft Vancouver Multnomah Co Washington Co Vendors Powell's Amazon B&N
	Buck, Pearl S: *The Good Earth* (1931) February 2012	© School Library Journal: This classic novel about Chinese peasant life around the turn of the 20th century seems a little dated now but still possesses enough emotional power to engage modern listeners. The book traces the slow rise of Wang Lung from humble peasant farmer to great landlord-a feat he achieves by steadily adding to his lands and making enormous sacrifices to retain them through hard times. As one of the first Western novels to explore the lives of ordinary Chinese, this work has had an enormous influence on American views of China, and it propelled Buck to the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1938.	Libraries Clackamas Co Ft Vancouver Multnomah Co Washington Co Vendors Powell's Amazon B&N
	Mann, Charles C.: *1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus* (2005) March 2012	© Reed Business Information: In a riveting and fast-paced history, massing archeological, anthropological, scientific and literary evidence, Mann debunks much of what we thought we knew about pre-Columbian America. Reviewing the latest, not widely reported research in Indian demography, origins and ecology, Mann zestfully demonstrates that long before any European explorers set foot in the New World, Native American cultures were flourishing with a high degree of sophistication. The new researchers have turned received wisdom on its head. For example, it has long been believed the Inca fell to Pizarro because they had no metallurgy to produce steel for weapons. In fact, scholars say, the Inca had a highly refined metallurgy, but valued plasticity over strength. What defeated the Inca was not steel but smallpox and resulting internecine warfare. Mann also shows that the Maya constructed huge cities and governed them with a cohesive set of political ideals. Most notably, according to Mann, the Haudenosaunee, in what is now the Northeast U.S., constructed a loose confederation of tribes governed by the principles of individual liberty and social equality. The author also weighs the evidence that Native populations were far larger than previously calculated. Mann, a contributor to the Atlantic Monthly and Science, masterfully assembles a diverse body of scholarship into a first-rate history of Native America and its inhabitants.	Libraries Clackamas Co Ft Vancouver Multnomah Co Washington Co Vendors Powell's Amazon B&N
	Mortenson, Greg, and David Oliver Relin: *Three Cups of Tea: One Man's Mission to Promote Peace...One School at a Time* (2006) Mortenson, Greg: *Stones into Schools: Promoting Peace with Books, Not Bombs, in Afghanistan and Pakistan* (2009) Krakauer, Jon: *Three Cups of Deceit: How Greg Mortenson, Humanitarian Hero, Lost His Way* (2011) April 2012	Special book discussion: Three Cups of What? Greg Mortenson's books (Three Cups of Tea and Stones into Schools) were hugely inspiring to millions, but Jon Krakauer (Three Cups of Deceit) has called key pieces of his stories into question. The truth is almost certainly somewhere in between. This gathering of CRPCA's Book Club was an extraordinary discussion shared by folks who read one, two, or all three of the books.	"...Tea" Libraries Clackamas Co Ft Vancouver Multnomah Co Washington Co Vendors Powell's Amazon B&N "Stones..." Libraries Clackamas Co Ft Vancouver Multnomah Co Washington Co Vendors Powell's Amazon B&N "...Deceit" Libraries Clackamas Co Ft Vancouver Multnomah Co Washington Co Vendors Powell's Amazon B&N
	Kidder, Tracy: *Mountains Beyond Mountains: The Quest of Dr. Paul Farmer, a Man Who Would Cure the World* (2003) May 2012	© School Library Journal: Thought-provoking and profoundly satisfying, this book will inspire feelings of humility, admiration, and disquietude; in some readers, it may sow the seeds of humanitarian activism. As a specialist in infectious diseases, Farmer's goal is nothing less than redressing the "steep gradient of inequality" in medical service to the desperately poor. His work establishing a complex of public health facilities on the central plateau of Haiti forms the keystone to efforts that now encompass initiatives on three continents. Farmer and a trio of friends began in the 1980s by creating a charitable foundation called Partners in Health (PIH, or Zanmi Lasante in Creole), armed with passionate conviction and $1 million in seed money from a Boston philanthropist. Kidder provides anecdotal evidence that their early approach to acquiring resources for the Haitian project at times involved a Robin Hood type of "redistributive justice" by liberating medical equipment from the "rich" (Harvard) and giving to the "poor" (the PIH clinic). Yet even as PIH has grown in size and sophistication, gaining the ability to influence and collaborate with major international organizations because of the founders' energy, professional credentials, and successful outcomes, their dedicated vision of doctoring to the poor remains unaltered. Farmer's conduct is offered as a "road map to decency," albeit an uncompromising model that nearly defies replication. This story is remarkable, and Kidder's skill in sequencing both dramatic and understated elements into a reflective commentary is unsurpassed.	Libraries Clackamas Co Ft Vancouver Multnomah Co Washington Co Vendors Powell's Amazon B&N