WorldView Magazine: Books
The Great Peace Corps Book Exchange
Books have always played an outsized role in the lives of Peace Corps Volunteers. PCVs spend hours thumbing through paperbacks while waiting (and waiting) for public transportation in their host countries; they learn about these countries by reading local writers; and they enter fictional worlds to alleviate their homesickness. While today’s Volunteers continue the grand tradition of reading, the way they do it has evolved with technology, changing how they access books, exchange them, and consume them. Yet they still tend to read the same types of books—whether about their host countries, their jobs, or just for fun—and they continue...
Born to Serve
Jason Carter, chair of the Carter Center board, reflects on his grandfather’s legacy, his experiences as an author, and his vision for the Carter Center as a new documentary about the effort to eradicate Guinea worm disease is released, and President Carter is honored with his own U.S. postal stamp.
Literary Legacy
Some Peace Corps journals go on to have a much larger reach as they are transformed into compelling memoirs, fiction, and other stories published professionally and even climbing to the top of bestseller lists.
Reading Room: RPCV Book Clubs
For many, book clubs have become a doorway back to service, a place where returned Volunteers can feel the same spark of curiosity that once led them across oceans.
A Million Miles: My Peace Corps Journey
This enthralling memoir from a former Peace Corps director follows the life of a curious and dedicated public servant, starting with her abandonment at age 3 and taking us through the next 76 exciting, joyful, and sometimes painful years of her life. Thankfully for the Peace Corps community, much of Jody Olsen’s life has included the agency, and her candid recollections are fascinating to read. But despite its title, A Million Miles: My Peace Corps Journey is as much about Olsen’s personal history as her professional one. She explores the dynamics of her childhood in a strict Mormon family, the...
Here Comes the Sun by Bill McKibben
I was just back from my Peace Corps service in Zaire when famed climate scientist Dr. James Hansen marched up to Capitol Hill in 1988 and told Congress—for the first time—that global warming was real. Fossil fuel combustion worldwide was overloading the atmosphere with carbon, he said, and overheating the planet. A year later, author Bill McKibben published his lyrical masterpiece The End of Nature, which grappled with the economic, social, and spiritual implications of a future where natural planetary rhythms give way to rampant wildfires, incessant sea-level rise, and heat waves that trap people, plants, and animals in their...
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...
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