Category: Lust To Go

Breakfast at Tiffany’s

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Capote, Truman. Breakfast at Tiffany’s. Read by Michael C. Hall. Grand Haven MI: Brilliance Audion, 1986.

Reason read: Because I read Like Water for Chocolate in honor of March being the best time to visit Mexico instead of in honor of the Oscars I decided to chose Breakfast for the Oscars even though this year the awards were dished out in February.

Everyone loves Holiday Golightly. Holly, as she is known to her friends, seems to appeal to all kinds of men and a certain kind of woman. This sassy and shallow teenager makes her way through a Manhattan existence surviving as a society girl, an “American Geisha” as Capote called his creation. She is eye candy to dangle on the arm of a wealthy gentleman so that he might buy her dinners in fancy restaurants, expensive gifts, and maybe, breakfast or two at Tiffany’s. Holly Golightly wants to be taken seriously but she is seen as more of an unusual mystery than anything else.
Told from the point of view of her neighbor, a writer who befriends her and becomes enthralled with her (like everyone else), he wants to believe his relationship with her is different. He believes she isn’t using him because he has nothing to offer…until she has nothing to offer him.

As an aside, I am betting many more people have seen the movie than read the book.

Favorite line, “Certain shades of limelight wreck a girl’s complexion” (p 134).

Author fact: Truman Capote also wrote the short story A Christmas Memory which I make my staff watch every year because I love it so much.

Book trivia: this is actually a novella. Short. Short . Short. You can read it in one sitting.

Narrator trivia: Michael C. Hall is the same actor who played serial killer Dexter.

Nancy said: The curious thing about what Nancy said about BAT is this – she includes Breakfast at Tiffany’s in the “American Girls” chapter and then discredits the choice by saying, …all novels about female Americans abroad owe a debt to Henry James…Many of them owe at least a little something to Truman Capote’s greatest invention, Holly Golightly, heroine and heartbreaker of Breakfast at Tiffany’s, but that’s not my subject here” (p 18). Does Holly belong in this chapter or not?

BookLust Twist: from Book Lust To Go in the chapter called “American Girls” (p 18). See previous paragraph for my comment on this.

Treachery in the Yard

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Ibe, Adimchinma. Treachery in the Yard. New York: Minotaur Books, 2010.

Reason read: Nigeria’s new president was sworn into office March of 2005.

Meet Tamunoemi “Tammy” Peterside. If this was a television show or a movie, Tammy would be the barely playing by the rules, dripping with sarcasm, wise mouthed but good looking cop who goes rogue from time to time. He would play by his own rules but always for the best reasons, of course. He’d have a beautiful girlfriend he pretends to care nothing about but wear a fierce loyalty to his work on his sleeve. In Treachery in the Yard he is the creation of Adimchinma Ibe, designed to be around for awhile. In this first mystery Tammy needs to solve a bombing that has left several people dead and a politician wounded. Every time Tammy gets close to the truth another body finds its way to the morgue. When someone very close to him is the next murder victim, Tammy knows he has to wrap up the case and fast. The ending may seem a little predictable and Ibe makes too many references to the heat, but other than that this is a good read!

Lines I liked, “You have to spend a lot of time climbing over the bodies to get to the truth” (p 49) and “Nothing is tough if you have an Uzi” (p 143).

As an aside, for a such a short book Ibe mentions Nigeria’s poverty a lot (I already mentioned the heat). Many sentences contained the words “could not afford,” or “it was expensive,” or “no new [fill in the blank],” or “it is cheaper to [fill in the blank].” I counted nearly a dozen such phrases by page 66, not even halfway through the book. It was a little distracting.

Author fact: Adimchinma was born in 1977 which makes me older than him by a few years.

Book trivia: Treachery in the Yard is a super short novel or a longer short story. At only 146 pages one could read it in one sitting. I did.

Nancy said: Pearl said she is confident we will see more of Adimchinma Ibe “in years to come” (p 157). She was right. He has gone on to publish another Tammy Peterside mystery titled Cronies.

BookLust Twist: from Book Lust To Go in the chapter called simply, “Nigeria” (p 157).

Antarctic Destinies

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Barczewski, Stephanie. Antarctic Destinies: Scott, Shackleton and the Changing Face of Heroism. London: Hambledon Continuum, 2007.

Reason read: February is exploration month.

Stephanie Barczewski’s Antarctic Destinies is organized into thirteen different topics. She is careful to set the groundwork for Destinies with an overview of Antarctic exploration from its humble beginnings with the 1901 Discoveries expedition. She goes on to make comparisons between the 1940 Terra Nova expedition of Robert Scott and the 1914 Endurance expedition of Ernest Shackleton. The ever-present question is of heroism. Scott had a heroic death while Shackleton had a heroic survival. So what exactly is a hero? Of the two, who is more the hero? How does the public respond to failure as opposed to the perception of success? Barczewski analyzes the reputations of both before wrapping up Destinies with how each member of the different expeditions has been commemorated. She finishes with Where Are Our Heroes Now?

As an aside – someone wrote in the margins, “how does sheer luck get transmuted into survival?” They wrote a whole bunch of other gobbledygook, but I liked that question best.

On a personal note: my father was busy in the Antarctic when I was born. There is some debate as to what he was actually doing. As a member of the Coast Guard I recall he was on a Coast Guard cutter clearing ice for research vessels. Mom remembers he was actually on board the research vessel itself. But, doing what?

Author fact: a Google query brought me to a Clemson University faculty web page where a smiley Barczewski poses with Mickey Mouse.

Book trivia: Antarctic Destinies includes only nine black and white photographs.

Nancy said: nothing interesting.

BookLust Twist: from Book Lust To Go in the chapter called “To the Ends of the Earth: North and South (Antarctic)” (p 235).

Travels with a Tangerine

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Mackintosh-Smith, Tim. Travels with a Tangerine: from Morocco to Turkey in the Footsteps of Islam’s Greatest Traveler. New York: Random House Trade Paperbacks, 2004.

Reason read: Admittedly, this is an oops read. I had Hall of a Thousand Columns on my list a few years back. At the time I didn’t realize you must read Travels before Hall so I vowed when the subject of “exploration” was to be honored again, I would circle back to Mackintosh-Smith and read Travels. The mistake lies in the fact I forgot to remove the other exploration book I had slated for 2017, Antarctic Destinies. As a result, I am reading them both.

Travels with a Tangerine takes us back to the year 1325 when the “greatest Islamic traveler” Ibn Battutah departed from Tangier on a pilgrimage to Mecca when he was 21 years old. There is nothing astonishing about someone wanting to take a pilgrimage to Mecca. What is so remarkable is where Ibn Battutah ended up. The trip took him almost thirty years and 75,000 miles. He spent his life on the road. At the same age, author Mackintosh-Smith sets out to follow in IB’s footsteps, admittedly taking short cuts because he doesn’t want to spend his entire life on this journey. But the result of this fascination is an interesting look back at the Arabic fourteenth century with eye an toward the future. Mackintosh-Smith’s humor makes it an easy read.

Quote to quote: “Then there were those reports of violence against Maghribi immigrants in Paris and Marseille, the deportations, the unimaginable shittiness of being an illegal alien” (p 31). Think about that sentence for a second. What has changed? Here’s another one, a little more lighthearted, “Defecation and ingestion of knowledge are such complementary activities” (p 105). So, that’s why men bring newspapers in the bathroom!

Author fact: Mackintosh-Smith is the winner of the Thomas Cook/Daily Telegraph Travel Book Award

Book trivia: Illustrations by Martin Yeoman. They are delightful. I especially liked the monkey on page 249.

BookLust Twist: Twisted twice – once from Book Lust in the chapter called “Here Be Dragons: the GReat Explorers and Expeditions” (p 110) and once in Book Lust To Go in the chapter called “In the Footsteps Of…” (p 100-101).

Island to Oneself

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Neale, Tom. An Island to Oneself. Woodbridge, Connecticut: Ox Bow Press, 1966.

Reason read: In January I read The Book of Puka-Puka by Dan Frisbie. Pearl recommended reading Tom Neale after, so I did.

I didn’t understand what would make a person pick up and leave all aspects of civilization until I read An Island to Oneself. Even Frisbie’s account in The Book of Puka-Puka didn’t answer the question because at least Frisbie lived and married among the natives. There were people to talk to. On the atoll of Suvarov in the South Pacific Tom Neale had (on his first visit 1952 – 1954) two cats, chickens & a wild duck he tamed for companionship. The occasional freighter would deter from its shipping lane, but those visits were few and far between. And yet, Neale thrived in that environment. Survival was his challenge and he prided himself on his ingenuity, creativeness and sheer willpower to make his self imposed solitary confinement comfortable. He spent his days keeping his abode spotless, working the land for farming, and fishing (the pig slaughter was a little difficult to read). On his second journey to Suvarov (he left the first time due to illness), Neale came back a smarter man. He built a better cook stove, brought more appropriate supplies and was better prepared for the wild weather that could batter his island from time to time. This time he stayed from 1960 to 1963. It wasn’t that Neale didn’t like people. He enjoyed the “tourists” who ended up visiting him. It was just that he wanted to do his own thing. Being alone wasn’t lonely.

Best quote I liked, “Mine was a simple existence” (p 24). No kidding!

AS an aside, I just learned Neale went back a third time and this time stayed ten years. Amazing.

Author fact: Tom Neale didn’t mind being naked. An Island to Oneself has 17 pictures with an almost naked Neale.

Book trivia: As mentioned before, there are great black and white photos, mostly of Neale, included.

Nancy said: Nancy called Island to Oneself a “classic account” (p 128).

BookLust Twist: from Book Lust To Go in the chapter called “Islands, Desert and Otherwise” (p 128)

Raven Black

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Cleeves, Ann. Raven Black. New York: Thomas Dunne Books, 2006.

Reason read: Shetland celebrates a Viking Fire fest on the last Tuesday in January called Up Helly Aa. Of course part of Raven Black takes place during Up Helly Aa.

Meet Inspector Jimmy Perez. In Ann Cleeves’s “Shetland” series, Perez is the angst-ridden, private detective charged with solving murders in the Shetland Islands. In Raven Black a teenager is brutally strangled just before the Up Helly Aa festival. Proximity and rumor make neighbor Magnus Tait the likely suspect. Magus, elderly and mentally ill has been the prime suspect in another unsolved crime from eight years ago: an eleven year old went missing and her body, never found.

Spoiler and Confessional: I had to roll my eyes just a little when I read the premise for this book: tiny community is rocked by the murder of a teenager. Everyone thinks the strange recluse with mental illness committed the crime because he probably killed the girl who went missing eight years ago, as well. After all, that man on the hill is not quite right. Cleeves takes that stereotype even further by making the mentally ill man look as guilty as possible along the way. The shocker would have been, yup, he did do it. Guilty as charged.

Author fact: at the time of publication, Ann Cleeves was the reader-in-residence for the Harrogate Crime Writing Festival.

Tons of book trivia: Raven Black is the first book in the Inspector Jimmy Perez series. There are three more, all on my list. Another piece of trivia: on her website, Ann Cleeves includes a map of Jimmy Perez’s Shetland. Very helpful. Also, Raven Black was made into a television series for the BBC in 2012. Last piece of trivia (and probably the most important one), Raven Black won the Duncan Lawrie Dagger Award.

Nancy said: “murder most foul” (p 205). Okay, so she could have said “murder most fowl” since the title of the book includes a bird and the murder victim was ravaged by ravens…

BookLust Twist: from Book Lust To Go in the obvious chapter called “Sheltering in the Shetlands” (p 204).

Captain of the Sleepers

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Montero, Mayra. Captain of the Sleepers. Translated by Edith Grossman. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2002.

Reason read: Hostos Day in Puerto Rico is on January 11th.

This is a very quick read. Once you get into it you won’t be able to put it down, and luckily because of its length you won’t have to. This is the story of Andreas Yasin who has carried a grudge against family friend J.T. Bunker for his entire adult life. Believing Bunker betrayed his family by having an affair with his mother when he was a small boy, Andreas seeks revenge against the now 83 year old man dying of cancer. But what is reality and what is just a childish memory? Set in the time of the Puerto Rican Independence movement politics permeate Andreas’s world.

Best line, “There is nothing more predictable for a mother than her own child” (p 127).

I know I’ve said this before but I am always amazed when my hometown of Monhegan is mentioned somewhere. I knew something was up when Montero gave one of her characters the home town of Port Clyde, Maine.

Author fact: Mayra Montero wrote one of my earliest Early Review books for LibraryThing, Dancing to ‘Almendra’ back in 2007.

Author trivia: I’m guessing Montero likes cats. The photograph of her on the dust jacket of Captain has a picture of her with a beautiful cat on her lap, only she looks like she is trying to strangle it!

Book trivia: I read this in one insomnia fueled night. It’s only 180 pages long.

Nancy said: Nancy has more to say about the translator than the book.

BookLust Twist: from Book Lust To Go in the chapter called “Cavorting Through the Caribbean: Puerto Rico (p 57).

River of Doubt

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Millard, Candice. River of Doubt: Theodore Roosevelt’s Darkest Journey. Read by Paul Michael. Westminster, MD: Books on Tape, 2005.

Reason: Theodore Roosevelt was the first American to win a Nobel Prize.

Millard paints Roosevelt’s biography in broad strokes, reviewing his fragile health as a child, the loss of his mother and wife in the same 24 hours (Valentine’s Day of all days), and his need to push his physical limits when faced with tragedies or failures. It is this need that sets the stage for Millard’s true focus: Roosevelt’s South American expedition to an uncharted tributary of the Amazon. He refused to go where everyone else had trod and yet, he expected the excursion to be ho-hum and without incident. Silly man. Millard’s account of the expedition has it all, excitement, adventure, violence, death and madness.

As an aside, can I just say I loved the fact that packed among Roosevelt’s supplies was a bottle of Tabasco? Not just hot sauce, but Tabasco by name.

Author fact: Millard used to be the editor for National Geographic Magazine.

Book trivia: My favorite photograph in River of Doubt is one of Kermit. His piercing stare says it all.

Audio trivia: Paul Michael’s accents are great.

Nancy said: “fast paced, well written and difficult to put down” (p 17). I would definitely agree.

BookLust Twist: from Book Lust To Go in the obvious chapter called “Amazonia” (p 17).

Conquest of the Incas

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Hemming, John. The Conquest of the Incas. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. Inc., 1970.

Reason read: December is supposedly the best time to visit Peru. Who knew?

Hemming explains his book as such, “Here I have tried to penetrate the clouds of conflicting hyperbole in contemporary reports and treatises” (p 17).

It is always difficult to read histories such as this because when it comes right down to it, this is a conquest of a people who were indigenous to the land; in other words, people who were “there” first. I found myself holding my breath when I read the sentence, “the moment had finally come when the first Spaniards were to confront the ruler of Peru” (page 33) because you just knew they were going to execute him at some point (and they did). All that aside, Hemming does a thorough job detailing the Spanish conquest of Peru. It is a worthy read, especially if you are planning to visit the region.

As an aside, Francisco Pizarro’s fanatical determination reminded me not a little of Percy Fawcett and his expedition into the Amazon. Which then reminded me of River of Doubt by Candice Millard, which I am reading now.

Author fact: Hemming is an expert on the Incas.

Book trivia: Conquest includes six pages of maps.

Nancy said: Conquest is one of three major histories of the Spanish Conquest of Peru.

BookLust Twist: from Book Lust To Go in the chapter called “Peru(sing) Peru” (p 177).

Rainbow’s End

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St. John, Lauren. rainbow’s end: A Memoir of Childhood, War and an African Farm. New York: Scribner, 2007.

Reason read: December 4th used to be Shangani Day in Rhodesia.

Rainbow’s End is a 1000 acre farm and game preserve in Rhodesia. In the fall of 1978 eleven year old Lauren St. John moves there with her family. This is during the dying, yet bloody, last stages of the Rhodesian Bush War. Rainbow’s End isn’t just a sprawling farm, it is also the scene of a bloody massacre less than a year earlier. The blood evidence still lingered.
Because Lauren’s coming of age years coincided with her time on the Rainbow’s End farm and the end of Rhodesia her memoir is part teenage angst biography and part commentary on the the war and its politics. Was it about Communism versus democracy or black against white? What makes Rainbow’s End so interesting is Lauren’s perception of being white in newly formed Zimbabwe after Independence and the realization she has been loving a war for all the wrong reasons.
There is no doubt of Rhodesia’s untamed beauty.

A line I liked, “Then I relocated to the sofa where I had my new books fanned around me like lives waiting to be lived” (p 48). As an aside, I can remember doing that same thing when I was a kid. I’d put the books in a row and pick one based on where I wanted to go next.

Author fact: St. John has also written a few sports books. None of them are on my list.

Book trivia: rainbow’s end includes a smattering of non-personal (if you don’t count the cover) photographs and a couple of maps. Interestingly enough, one of the maps includes “hippo pools.” Oh goody.

Nancy said: nada. She just listed it for the chapter.

BookLust Twist: from Book Lust To Go in the chapter called “Zipping Through Zambia/Roaming Rhodesia” (p 269).

Geometry of Love

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Visser, Margaret. The Geometry of Love: Space, Time, Mystery, and Meaning in an Ordinary Church. New York: North Point Press, 2000.

Reason read: Saturnalia Solstice in Rome happens in December.

Author fact: Visser was born in South Africa.

The Sant’ Agnese fouri le Mura church is named for a twelve year old girl named Agnes who was murdered in 305 A.D. Her throat was cut after she refused to marry the son of a Roman prefect. The name literally means “Saint Agnes Outside the Walls”. In addition to a physical description of the church Visser supplies a mental and spiritual picture as well. She takes the reader on a journey back to the roots of Christianity with etymology lessons thrown in for good measure. My favorite part was the comparison of church to theater. Of audience and performance. Evocation of imagination and emotion in both arenas. Geometry of Love is for anyone with a good imagination and wants to “see” Sant’ Agnese fouri le Mura church for him or herself.

My one criticism is the etymology. Visser pauses to tease apart words to reveal their deeper meaning quite often. Words like remember, mind, theatre, nave, orientation, gospel, error, heresy, pilgrim, passion, orthodoxy (I could go on and on and on) are explained. It reminded me of trying to have a conversation in the woods with a good friend who happened to also be an avid birder. Every sentence was punctuated or interrupted with “Did you hear that? That was a female Hylocichla mustelina…adolescent, of course.” And then we would pause to listen to the bird that, to me, sounded like every other brown bird in the trees. Having a normal back and forth conversation was damn near impossible.

Quotes I liked, “…the sea is a major metaphor in Greek literature for fate and necessity, or circumstances otherwise beyond human control” (p 62), “Today, the lambs arrive at Sant’ Agnese’s by car” (p 120), and “For anyone who is not spiritually allergic to churches, to walk into a beautiful church is to encounter understanding, to hear echoes of the soul’s own experiences” (p 125).

Book trivia: Despite the fact this book focuses on a particular church there are no photographs of it in Geometry of Love. Bummer. I really would have liked to see the statue of Agnes since Visser describes it so lovingly.

Nancy said: Geometry of Love is “the study” of the Sant’ Agnese fouri le Mura church.

BookLust Twist: from Book Lust To Go in the chapter called “Roman Holiday” (p 189).

Tu

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Grace, Patricia. Tu. University of Hawaii Press, 2004.

Reason read: New Zealand was discovered in December

The novel Tu opens and closes with a letter. New Zealander Tu Hokowhitu-a-Tu owes an explanation to his niece and nephew, Rimini and Benedict. Sandwiched between the letters there are Tu’s journals interspersed with third person flashbacks. In his journals Tu tries to tackle the war in his own words. The war everyone is signing up for. World War II. In flashbacks we learn Big Brother Pita thought he should stay home to care for his family until the fighting pulls him in and seesm to be the only way out. Pita follows feisty Brother Rangi, already wild with battle. Left behind is little Te Hokowhitu-a-Tu. Too-young-to-go-to-war Tu, but there’s no place he would rather be. Maybe because of his brothers? He wants to be useful. He wants to get away. Through his journals he implies enlistment means freedom and despite being underage he signs up for the Maori Battalion.
When it is all said and done, and the war is over(sorry, accidental spoiler alert), there is a poignant moment when Tu asks himself who will he be now that the war is finished and there is no more fighting. Where is his place in life?

I found it interesting that all three brothers would want to go into battle after seeing what war did to their father. Coming back from World War I and wracked by post traumatic stress disorder, their father at times was a wild and raging man; given to fits of insanity and violence.

Interesting to note: New Zealand’s June had 31 days back in 1943.

A quote that got me, “…I’ve decided I’ll write only when there are enough words in my head to create a flow to paper through a warmed up pen” (p 23). How many times have I said that same thing? Another quote, “When you see a man fall you’re not sure whether or not it was your bullet or someone else’s that dropped him, so his death does not feel so real to you” (p 82). Two more: “Perhaps there’s an in-between state where ghosts walk in and out of you, or where you could be your own ghost coming and going” (p 180), and “Reading intrudes on thought and takes a man away from so much self-pity” (p 238).

Author fact: Grace is not Patricia’s given last name. But, that’s not the interesting fact. She was inspired to write Tu by her Maori father’s involvement in World War II. He went to fight for the very country that was trying to control his.

Book trivia: Tu won the Montana New Zealand Book Award.

Nancy said: “…beautifully written and depressing…” (p 125). I would have to agree.

BookLust Twist: from Book Lust To Go in the chapter called “Kwikis Forever!: New Zealand” (p 125).

City and the City

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Mieville, China. The City and the City. Read by John Lee. New York: Random House, 2009.

Reason read: November is Imagination month and believe me, this book takes the imagination to the moon.

Despite the fact Tyador Borlu is investigating the murder of foreign student Mahalia Geary, the real main characters of The City and the City are the city and the city, Beszel and Ul Qoma. In order to wrap your brain around the plot you first need to understand the landscape. Each city shares essentially the same geographic space. Members of each city are trained to “ignore” the other and to perceive “their” city as different from that other one. Everything, from the clothes people wear to the architectural styles of the buildings, is seen as unique to the people within “their” city. Residents are taught to have different languages and mannerisms to further differentiate themselves; and to acknowledge the other city’s existence or “see” is called Breach. Breach is worse than murder. Residents need to learn how to “unsee” the other city or face the consequences of Breach. Only Copula Hall exists in both cities and is in fact the gateway to travel from one city to another.
But, back to the plot: murder victim Mahalia Geary was found mutilated in Borlu’s city, Beszel, but after some investigation Tyador Borlu learns she had connections to that other city, Ul Qoma. And to complicate matters, she was researching a third city, Orciny. Was her investigation getting too close to the truth? Was she murdered because she was about to expose a completely different society with nefarious activities? As Borlu gets closer to the truth he increases his chances of Breach.

As an aside, I now know why I don’t do well with fantasy and science fiction. The weird names that seem to be a staple of the genres are hard to pronounce and even harder to remember. No wonder I didn’t do well in my foreign language class.

Author fact: I read somewhere that Mieville wrote The City and the City for his dying mother since she loved police procedurals.

Book trivia: The City and the City won a Hugo award and many, many others.

BookLust Twist: from Book Lust To Go in the chapter appropriately called “Travels to Imaginary Places” (p 236).

Love Songs From a Shallow Grave

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Cotterill, Colin. Love Songs From a Shallow Grave. New York: SoHo Press, 2010.

Reason read: I started this series in May 2016 in honor of Laos and Rocket Day. It’s with mixed emotions that I announce this is the last book on my list. While the series goes on for me, it ends here.

Dr. Siri is just trying to watch a movie with his lovely wife, Madame Daeng, when he is rudely called away to examine the naked body of a young female security officer found in a sauna with an epee through the heart. In quick succession two more women are found murdered in the same manner. Dr. Siri can’t just be the national (and reluctant) coroner. He needs to find out who did this before the wrong man is condemned in public court. There is one problem, Dr. Siri is the only one who believes they have the wrong man and he’s locked up in a Cambodian prison.

It is always great when a series has strong supporting characters that only get stronger with each installment. Madame Daeng, Inspector Phosy, and best friend Civilai are back.. Even Mr. Geung, Dr. Siri’s assistant, is in the action. We learn in this installment that he gets his hair permed by Nurse Dtui.

Quotes I liked or laughed at: “To find a young crocodile with a good mind among the flock of flamingos was a rare delight” (p 8) and “Not knowing what’s going on makes my teeth curl with frustration” (p 35). Here’s a couple of not so funny ones to make you think: “Hungry people made poor environmentalists” (p 70) and “And what you don’t find you don’t lose” (p 298). Right.

Author fact: What have I told you thus far about Colin Cotterill? I mentioned his website twice (because I love it so much). I also told you he lived in Thailand and has taught in Australia. New info: he has a wife named Jessi and has a bunch of dogs.

Book trivia: this is book seven of the Dr. Siri Paiboun series. However, there are four more not on my list. Boo.

BookLust Twist: from Book Lust To Go in the chapter called “Laos” (p 128). Sad to say that for the last time!

Living Poor: a Peace Corps Chronicle

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Thomsen, Moritz. Living Poor: a Peace Corps Chronicle. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1969.

Reason read: Ecuador’s war of independence ended in November. Moritz travels to Ecuador for his stint in the Peace Corps.

Split into four sections chronicling the years 1965, 1966, 1967 & 1968 Living Poor starts at the most logical place, Thomsen’s application. His expertise as a pig farmer made him the perfect match for helping Ecuadorian farmers raise chickens and pigs and grow vegetable gardens. His first assignment,  La Union was short lived due to a lung infection that sent him back to the States. His second “tour” landed him in Rio Verde. I have to wonder what the natives of La Union thought of his departure after he took so long to fit in with them. It was no different in Rio Verde. The community, poverty stricken and on the brink of starvation, is suspicious of Thomsen. Every effort he makes to better their environment is met with stonewalling and infighting. When he does create relationships with key members of the community everyone else is jealous and tries to sabotage their efforts. While Thomsen is humorous in parts, for the most part his retelling of his experience is bleak and seemingly hopeless.

As an aside, even though I write in my own books all the time I cannot stand getting a library book that has been underlined, drawn or written in.

Quotes worth quoting, “The village that lived in my mind was at the end of the world, but by God, you didn’t have to walk twenty-five miles to get there” (p 25), “…the truth is that nothing looks romantic from a banana truck” (p 28), and “Well, it wasn’t funny to me, although the madness and chaos of the meeting had me on the verge of hysterical laughter(or else so frustrated that I simply wanted to bite someone.)” (p 195). I have been there myself.

Author fact: Thomsen applied to volunteer for the Peace Corps when he was 48 years old. Personally, this took me by surprise because my father advised my 17 year old self to join because I appeared lost and without direction. In truth, I just didn’t want to admit my passion was to become a librarian.

Book trivia: this book had an interesting beginning: Thomsen went to the San Francisco Chronicle and offered to write essays about the Peace Corps. The paper declined, but Thomsen sent them his writings anyway…which they published.

Book trivia two: the illustrations are fabulous. No credit is given in my copy.

BookLust Twist: from Book Lust To Go in the chapter called “Peace Corps Memories” (p 175).