Scan barcode
karinlib's review against another edition
3.0
This book took me a long time to read. I think it is because I didn't love it. Josh Swiller joins the Peace Corps and is sent to Zambia to drill wells with the local villagers. Josh is completely deaf, but he can hear some with his hearing aids, and lip reads. Mununga is a remote village that has no running water electricity. Unfortunately he alienates the chief his first day in Mununga, and that is his first mistake. Josh is really unable to get any wells drilled because of his feud with the chief, but he becomes friendly with Augustine Jere who runs the clinic. Instead of drilling wells, Josh helps in the clinic.
Josh ends up falling in love with village life, although he sees some pretty horrific things, that eventually forces him to leave.
I really can't say what I didn't like about the book, except I found myself not liking Josh, he seemed a bit immature. I wanted to like this book because I have a physical disability as well as some hearing loss, so I wanted to learn more about Josh's life. He did talk about growing up deaf, but it seems as though he didn't deal with it well.
Josh ends up falling in love with village life, although he sees some pretty horrific things, that eventually forces him to leave.
I really can't say what I didn't like about the book, except I found myself not liking Josh, he seemed a bit immature. I wanted to like this book because I have a physical disability as well as some hearing loss, so I wanted to learn more about Josh's life. He did talk about growing up deaf, but it seems as though he didn't deal with it well.
jenmooremo's review against another edition
4.0
I originally was introduced to this book after a NPR story on Weekend Edition, I believe. Although the NPR story talked mostly about he and his brother and cousin receiving cochlear implants (that in itself is amazing enough) the way that Josh Swiller read a selection from his book is what mostly drew me to read his work. You could tell in his tone and tamber that the two years he spent in the Peace Corps in Zambia were what shaped his life. All along he thought it would be the deafness that determined the path that he took as an adult, and he soon discovered in Africa that his inability to hear was actually an afterthought to his life as a whole.
This book is a good read with a few slow chapters in the middle, but a lot of heartbreak, happiness and triumph throughout. Josh Swiller has a talent for allowing us to get to know the people that he knew first hand...the good, the bad and the unwanted.
This book is a good read with a few slow chapters in the middle, but a lot of heartbreak, happiness and triumph throughout. Josh Swiller has a talent for allowing us to get to know the people that he knew first hand...the good, the bad and the unwanted.
alanaleigh's review against another edition
4.0
With all due respect to my book club's selector this month, I must admit, I wasn't gung-ho about this book when I agreed to it. When I went to purchase it, I even hoped that the little bookstore in my neighborhood wouldn't have it so I could buy myself an Agatha Christie novel for that weekend instead. But it was there and so I bought it... and I quickly realized that I had underestimated this book and the author. Josh Swiller did a great job with this. It wasn't necessarily the events in his story that kept me going at a steady pace, but the narration of the author.
You know the story will be heartbreaking and you know that Peace Corp volunteers are often thrown into situations where they're expected to make a difference in the face of incredible odds. But really made the book for me is the fact that you just really like Josh Swiller. He has a wonderfully snarky sense of humor. Born and raised in Manhattan, Josh lost pretty much all of his hearing by age 4. But rather than surround him with a deaf community, his parents didn't really discuss it much and he (and one of his three brothers) went to regular schools, relying on lip-reading and hearing aids. He didn't even meet many deaf people (again, besides his brother) until he was in his twenties. He fights with his brothers (particularly Zev) and he admits that he might have used the sensitive soul angle to get laid in college, but after attending Yale, he wasn't sure what to do with himself. So he signed up for the Peace Corp... and he was shipped off to a small village in Zambia.
If only for his style, I recommend this book. Unlike some people who write memoirs of going to Africa and having their lives changed or being deaf, Swiller is first and foremost a guy you can relate to, and it's only on the second level that he happens to be deaf. He articulates his experience as a deaf person in ways that I have never encountered. Perhaps the most interesting point is that he finds his deafness minimized in Africa. People make a point of speaking directly to this important white man in their community, so he can read their lips with greater ease. Otherwise, he's just another white guy in Africa who realizes that he doesn't know how to achieve his lofty goals and so he's got to adapt to the situation and do what he can.
So I say "Well done, Swiller," and thanks to this month's book club selector for making me read a book that I thoroughly enjoyed and wouldn't have otherwise picked up.
You know the story will be heartbreaking and you know that Peace Corp volunteers are often thrown into situations where they're expected to make a difference in the face of incredible odds. But really made the book for me is the fact that you just really like Josh Swiller. He has a wonderfully snarky sense of humor. Born and raised in Manhattan, Josh lost pretty much all of his hearing by age 4. But rather than surround him with a deaf community, his parents didn't really discuss it much and he (and one of his three brothers) went to regular schools, relying on lip-reading and hearing aids. He didn't even meet many deaf people (again, besides his brother) until he was in his twenties. He fights with his brothers (particularly Zev) and he admits that he might have used the sensitive soul angle to get laid in college, but after attending Yale, he wasn't sure what to do with himself. So he signed up for the Peace Corp... and he was shipped off to a small village in Zambia.
If only for his style, I recommend this book. Unlike some people who write memoirs of going to Africa and having their lives changed or being deaf, Swiller is first and foremost a guy you can relate to, and it's only on the second level that he happens to be deaf. He articulates his experience as a deaf person in ways that I have never encountered. Perhaps the most interesting point is that he finds his deafness minimized in Africa. People make a point of speaking directly to this important white man in their community, so he can read their lips with greater ease. Otherwise, he's just another white guy in Africa who realizes that he doesn't know how to achieve his lofty goals and so he's got to adapt to the situation and do what he can.
So I say "Well done, Swiller," and thanks to this month's book club selector for making me read a book that I thoroughly enjoyed and wouldn't have otherwise picked up.
tboltkid's review against another edition
4.0
Definitely a good read if you are considering to volunteer in Africa or anywhere in the developing world. He speaks from a unique perspective and is unafraid to point out some of his own flaws.
lavoiture's review against another edition
4.0
Easy read, very interesting story. I'm not sure if it made me want to go to Africa or to stay away forever...
dlberglund's review against another edition
4.0
This was a difficult book about a Peace Corps volunteer in the first group to go back to Zambia, and the challenges of his village. He also has had near total hearing loss since childhood. The book explores the way that it is more and less difficult to be deaf in rural Africa than in the US. Then there's the hostile village leaders, the disappearing supplies and the angry mob...
liralen's review against another edition
3.0
Another Peace Corps memoir, this by a man who was born with severely impaired hearing and who lost most of the rest of his hearing before he was in school. His parents pushed him hard to fit in in the hearing world -- in the 70s, other options weren't great -- and after college (side note: just because college admissions are the first time you overtly 'play the deaf card' doesn't mean that's the first time you've ever played it) he joined the Peace Corps and was sent to Zambia. There, he says, he found a place where deafness didn't matter. 'For the first time in my life deafness...did not close off a single possibility,' he says (95).
It's an interesting concept, but as far as I can tell a deeply flawed one. During his in-country training, Swiller happened upon a school that had a couple of classrooms of deaf students. He spent some time volunteering there and found that those kids had effectively been given up on. They received almost no instruction, could barely read or write, and had really no hope of success later on in life. At least one boy had hearing aids, but the fit was bad (causing pain if he wore them very long), and anyway, he couldn't afford batteries. There just wasn't any belief in these kids, or understanding that deafness didn't mean incapability.
But in the village where Swiller was placed, he had a much easier time communicating than he usually had in the U.S.: There wasn't much background noise. People talked slower, and they looked directly at him when they talked (making it easier for him to read lips). If he couldn't understand people, they usually chalked it up to their English being poor. Because he didn't fit the model of deafness they knew in Zambia -- the model of those children in the deaf classrooms -- and because they'd never seen hearing aids before and didn't understand them, they generally just didn't believe he was deaf.
He was a white man, after all. And that, I think, is the crux of it: It's not that his deafness didn't matter. It's that his whiteness trumped his deafness.
It's an interesting book, and in many senses I think Swiller had a more difficult PC experience than the authors of other PC books I've read. He saw some really frightening instances of violence; he was in a terrible accident; he was one of the first Peace Corps volunteers in the region, which meant that people didn't know what to expect. It definitely doesn't sound easy.
But, but. Because Swiller was one of the first Peace Corps volunteers there, a large part of his role -- as a supervisor explicitly told him was basic cultural exchange. Learn about the culture. Teach the villagers something about where he comes from. Don't expect to get too much actually done. He didn't get much done, although I'm not sure how abnormal that is. But he also demonstrates a rather stunning inability to understand that he's in a different culture, with different expectations, different societal mores, different ways of doing things.
I'm reminded of a story in [b:The Ponds of Kalambayi|477819|The Ponds of Kalambayi|Mike Tidwell|https://d202m5krfqbpi5.cloudfront.net/books/1175098398s/477819.jpg|466013], in which the author asked someone to plant some lettuce seeds for him. The man planted all of the seeds, leaving him with a surfeit of lettuce -- so much that he'd never get through it before it rotted. The author wanted to pay the man only for the small portion of lettuce he'd expected; the man wanted to be paid for all the lettuce he'd planted. The case went to the village court, where it was decided that the author would pay the man in full -- but as a show of goodwill, the man would give the author a 'gift' of the same amount that the author was paying. In other words, it came out a wash, but a saving-face wash.
This book reminds me of that because Swiller never understands the face-saving portion of things. He talks about, as a deaf man, developing an 'intuition based on physical observation' (133), of being especially attuned to people's body language and facial expression because he can't hear them. That may well be true, but apparently that didn't come with an increased understanding of what to do with that intuition. He wants everything to work the way he's used to it -- the American way -- and preferably on his schedule. I fully believe that it was, is, extremely frustrating to adapt to a very different way of doing things, of phrasing things, but, but. Damn. It sounds like a really enormous failure at the whole cultural-exchange end of things. By the end of the book he'd and the Peace Corps -- which seems just as well, because I'd hate to be the one to follow him.
This isn't meant to be a scathing indictment of the author; I understand that he was young and in a new-to-him environment full of challenges and that nobody's perfect; he went in with good intentions and not a lot of resources. He also went in with a perspective, and with hopes, that most people don't have. I just found myself disappointed by the non-discussion of things like the role race played in how Zambia locals viewed his deafness.
It's an interesting concept, but as far as I can tell a deeply flawed one. During his in-country training, Swiller happened upon a school that had a couple of classrooms of deaf students. He spent some time volunteering there and found that those kids had effectively been given up on. They received almost no instruction, could barely read or write, and had really no hope of success later on in life. At least one boy had hearing aids, but the fit was bad (causing pain if he wore them very long), and anyway, he couldn't afford batteries. There just wasn't any belief in these kids, or understanding that deafness didn't mean incapability.
But in the village where Swiller was placed, he had a much easier time communicating than he usually had in the U.S.: There wasn't much background noise. People talked slower, and they looked directly at him when they talked (making it easier for him to read lips). If he couldn't understand people, they usually chalked it up to their English being poor. Because he didn't fit the model of deafness they knew in Zambia -- the model of those children in the deaf classrooms -- and because they'd never seen hearing aids before and didn't understand them, they generally just didn't believe he was deaf.
He was a white man, after all. And that, I think, is the crux of it: It's not that his deafness didn't matter. It's that his whiteness trumped his deafness.
It's an interesting book, and in many senses I think Swiller had a more difficult PC experience than the authors of other PC books I've read. He saw some really frightening instances of violence; he was in a terrible accident; he was one of the first Peace Corps volunteers in the region, which meant that people didn't know what to expect. It definitely doesn't sound easy.
But, but. Because Swiller was one of the first Peace Corps volunteers there, a large part of his role -- as a supervisor explicitly told him was basic cultural exchange. Learn about the culture. Teach the villagers something about where he comes from. Don't expect to get too much actually done. He didn't get much done, although I'm not sure how abnormal that is. But he also demonstrates a rather stunning inability to understand that he's in a different culture, with different expectations, different societal mores, different ways of doing things.
I'm reminded of a story in [b:The Ponds of Kalambayi|477819|The Ponds of Kalambayi|Mike Tidwell|https://d202m5krfqbpi5.cloudfront.net/books/1175098398s/477819.jpg|466013], in which the author asked someone to plant some lettuce seeds for him. The man planted all of the seeds, leaving him with a surfeit of lettuce -- so much that he'd never get through it before it rotted. The author wanted to pay the man only for the small portion of lettuce he'd expected; the man wanted to be paid for all the lettuce he'd planted. The case went to the village court, where it was decided that the author would pay the man in full -- but as a show of goodwill, the man would give the author a 'gift' of the same amount that the author was paying. In other words, it came out a wash, but a saving-face wash.
This book reminds me of that because Swiller never understands the face-saving portion of things. He talks about, as a deaf man, developing an 'intuition based on physical observation' (133), of being especially attuned to people's body language and facial expression because he can't hear them. That may well be true, but apparently that didn't come with an increased understanding of what to do with that intuition. He wants everything to work the way he's used to it -- the American way -- and preferably on his schedule. I fully believe that it was, is, extremely frustrating to adapt to a very different way of doing things, of phrasing things, but, but. Damn. It sounds like a really enormous failure at the whole cultural-exchange end of things. By the end of the book he'd
Spoiler
literally been driven out of townSpoiler
had decided not to send anyone else to that same villageThis isn't meant to be a scathing indictment of the author; I understand that he was young and in a new-to-him environment full of challenges and that nobody's perfect; he went in with good intentions and not a lot of resources. He also went in with a perspective, and with hopes, that most people don't have. I just found myself disappointed by the non-discussion of things like the role race played in how Zambia locals viewed his deafness.
ellensears's review against another edition
5.0
the last paragraph of the penultimate chapter...as a peace corps volunteer a good memoir of a peace corps volunteer
jkinkadeblack's review against another edition
adventurous
emotional
hopeful
reflective
medium-paced
5.0
renatasnacks's review against another edition
5.0
Hands down the best Peace Corps book I've read. Funny, interesting, and none of the sappy bullshit other PC books sometimes try to pull. And seriously Josh Swiller sounds like a total badass.