The Lost Trees of Willow Avenue
Reading The Lost Trees of Willow Avenue feels like strolling through your hometown with an affable neighbor, one filled with a deep respect for the natural world and a pragmatic concern for its demise. On one level, Mike Tidwell recounts just a single year, 2023, in a Washington, D.C., suburb whose residents cope with the local effects of global climate change: the tombstone stumps of new-fallen trees, the sudden gaps in rich canopy across which the wind now blows “like human breath over the tops of empty bottles,” the flooding school basement, and the sidewalk berm installed as a countermeasure...
Married to Amazement
When Kathleen Coskran’s memoir kicks off by disclosing to her readers that she’s not just old, but old old (81 years), we can’t help but be drawn in by her humor and candor. She doesn’t claim to offer any pearls of wisdom, but instead offers up little snippets of wonder, glimpses of her extraordinary life experience. She offers us not pearls, but absolute gems. She opens with her first grand cross-cultural adventure, a crash course in amazement, when she accepts a Peace Corps assignment in 1965 teaching English and algebra in Ethiopia and confronts the uncomfortable revelations of American privilege...
Far from the Road: A Community Health Project in the Himalayas
The inspiring and dramatic events in Far from the Road unfolded half a century ago in the verdant, idyllic valley of Dhorpatan, at 9,000 feet elevation in Nepal. Ross Anthony, from Oklahoma City, a returned agricultural Volunteer, conceived the project alongside Nepal’s first NGO, Paropakar. With passion and persistence, “Ross the Boss” cobbled together shoestring-level funding and signed up Mary Murphy, a community health educator from suburban Washington, D.C. They recruited Stephen Bezruchka, a Stanford Medical School grad from Toronto, and were later joined by Mike Payne, a water systems engineer from Cleveland, Ohio. With ponies and porters, the team...
Before Before: A Story of Discovery and Loss in Sierra Leone
Betsy Small’s Before Before is a deeply personal and historically rich account of Sierra Leone, blending memoir and ethnography with emotional resonance. She draws from her Peace Corps service in the mid-1980s and a return visit in 2013 with her daughter to create a memoir that is more than a recollection—it is a meditation on cultural exchange, colonial legacy, and the fragile threads of memory that bind us across time and geography. Set in Tokpombu, a remote rainforest village in Sierra Leone’s diamond district, Small’s story begins with her assignment as an agricultural Volunteer tasked with improving rice yields despite...
Endless Horizons
Paul Neville’s memoir of backpacking around Southeast Asia and South America more than fulfills the promise in his subtitle: A Global Backpacker’s Quest for Adventure, Connection, and Discovery. Readers will find this self-published effort a thoroughly professional product. Expect to enjoy an assiduously edited, excellently laid out, and beautifully written book. After two years as a Peace Corps Volunteer in Tonga, Neville’s “festering travel bug”—a condition nearly universal among returned Volunteers—launches him into a year of vagabonding on a shoestring budget. Intermingled with vivid travelogue, he tries to explain why. There is novelty, of course. Bangkok, his first stop, is...
Other Rivers: A Chinese Education
I have been an admirer of Peter Hessler’s work since reading his first book, River Town, about his Peace Corps service at a Chinese university in the 1990s. I was particularly drawn to that book because of my own Peace Corps work in a Korean university and professional ties to China. Hessler wrote eloquently about his Peace Corps experience in a way that I think any returned Volunteer could relate to. Other Rivers: A Chinese Education, Hessler’s latest book about China, is just as interesting and satisfying as the three other books about the country he wrote as a journalist...
When a Picture Sells a Thousand Words
From an early age, many of us are told not to judge a book by its cover, yet we intuitively know that first impressions matter—maybe more than they should. While the power of a book lies in its storytelling, its narrative, its words, very often the thing that determines whether those words are plucked from the shelf of a local bookstore is a book’s cover. Something will always be lost in translation when distilling a 70,000-word narrative into a single page, but when a cover lands “just right,” the result can have an outsized impact. So what story is the...
Letter to a First-Time Peace Corps Writer
No matter who you are, sitting down to a blank page to try and tell the story of your life can be daunting. But I’m here to reassure you that, as a Returned Peace Corps Volunteer, you have a great story to tell. The key question is where to start. Jacques Barzun, an accomplished writer and historian who taught at Columbia University, wrote that to become a writer you have to convince yourself that you are working in clay, not marble—on paper, not eternal bronze—so let that first sentence be as stupid as it wishes. Just put it down, then...
A Life Lived in Books
Dan Pelzer started recording every book he read in 1962, when he arrived in Dharan, Nepal, as a Peace Corps Volunteer, and began a ritual of reading through the paperbacks in his Peace Corps book locker by the bright light of a Petromax kerosene pump lantern. Thus a lifelong passion for literature was sparked, which, with the help of Dan’s daughter Marci, has gone on to inspire untold numbers of people since his death in 2025 at the age of 92. After he passed away on July 1, Marci posted her father’s meticulously handwritten record of the 3,599 books he...
Helicopters and The Himalayan Gourmet Cookbook
The word “gourmet” is not often associated with Peace Corps service, but if you were serving in the high Himalayas in the 1960s, you may have a different understanding of that term than most of us. Diana Oppedal (Nepal 1965–67) was 19, a recent high school graduate from Ames, Iowa, when she received her invitation to go to Nepal in 1965. Her parents weren’t pleased with the news and suggested she join the military, “but I wanted to join the Peace Corps, so off I went,” Oppedal said. Pretty soon she was in Kathmandu, supporting the Peace Corps medical office...