After writing my own memoir, “Different Latitudes, My Life in the Peace Corps and Beyond”, I began paying more attention to this genre and have reviewed several books of fellow Returned Peace Corps Volunteers. This book interested me as well because I’ve traveled through Peru several times over the years and my Son-In-Law is Peruvian.
I connected with the author through a shared appreciation of the author of Living Poor, Moritz Thomsen. He also reviewed Thomsen’s book Bad News from a Black Coast, and it was so good I asked to include it in a novel I’m working on about the influence of Moritz Thomsen on other writers, and he agreed.
I first became aware of the author at a “Peace Corps Connect” conference in Austin, Texas in 2019 where she was on a panel on “Crossing Borders” with several experts on immigration including the Guatemalan filmmaker, Luis Argueta. Recently, I heard her program on immigration in Guatemala, which aired on the public radio program “Reveal.” I contacted her once I learned that she was the head of the “Gracias Vida Media Center” in Antigua, Guatemala, which was when I learned about her new book, which was published by Conocimientos Press.
I’ve gotten to know the author over the years based on a shared appreciation of iconic writer Moritz Thomsen, who Tom met in Ecuador and our love of travel and travel writing. The Panama Hat Trail is one of my all-time favorite tales, and I was impressed when I learned it took the author two trips and eight months to complete it! My wife, who is Guatemalan, loved How I Learned English, a series of stories of Latinos learning English.
The Long Night of White Chickens was my introduction to Francisco Goldman, the author who I selected to review due to his connections to Guatemala, and I’ve been a fan ever since. Though born in Boston, his mother is a Catholic Guatemalan, his father Jewish American, so his life started off with an intriguing combination of influences.
Este libro es una autobiografía de un increíble antropólogo y escritor guatemalteco. Él cuenta la extraordinaria historia de un niño Maya quien busca mejorar su vida a través de la educación. Es una historia de sueños y metas que atraviesa el mundo Maya y el Occidental.
“A Promise Broken” by Kim Anderson is a 410-page period piece set in England that follows Alice as she returns to her noble origins, faced with the prospect of an arranged marriage and a culture she knows nothing about. After being raised as a commoner with her sister, Alice discovers the true nature of her birth when her mother becomes ill. The sisters are sent to Lord Hastings, a wealthy duke and the father they left as infants. Discovering the truth about her father, the reasons she was taken away from him, and the marriage he has arranged for her, Alice’s world is thrown into turmoil.
Recalling some of the most memorable escapades ever conducted in the Canadian Arctic with bush planes, Flying to Extremes takes place in the late ’60s and early ’70s from a base at Yellowknife, in the heart of the Northwest Territories. Beyond recounting so many near-mishaps, this book is also about colourful people: the trappers, prospectors, miners, adventurers and gold-ingot thieves who constituted the fauna at the main bar in Yellowknife in those days.
After both her parents died, Linda Murphy Marshall, a multi-linguist and professional translator, returns to her midwestern childhood home, Ivy Lodge, to sort through a lifetime of belongings with her siblings. Room by room, she sifts through the objects in her parents’ house and uses her skills and perspective as a longtime professional translator to make sense of the events of her past—to “translate” her memories and her life. In the process, she sees things with new eyes.
A young girl suffers personal loss with the death of her father during WWII and must endure all the hardships living in a frequently bombed suburb of London with her mother.
Displaced from their home, the two were compelled to remain strong and to make the best life possible for themselves whether in an air raid shelter, living in rented rooms, or navigating bombed out streets.
