BiblioVault - Books about Americans

Heart of Palms

My Peace Corps Years in Tranquilla

Meredith W. Cornett

University of Alabama Press, 2014

Heart of Palms is a clear-eyed memoir of Peace Corps service in the rural Panamanian village of Tranquilla through the eyes of a young American woman trained as a community forester.

In the storied fifty-year history of the US Peace Corps, Heart of Palms is the first Peace Corps memoir set in Panama, the slender isthmus that connects two continents and two oceans. In her memoir, Meredith Cornett transports readers to the remote village of Tranquilla, where dugout canoes are the mainstay of daily transportation, life and nature are permeated by witchcraft, and a restful night’s sleep may be disturbed by a raiding phalanx of army ants.

Cornett is sent to help counter the rapid deforestation that is destroying the ecosystem and livelihoods of the Panama Canal watershed region. Her first chapters chronicle her arrival and struggles not only with the social issues of language, loneliness, and insecurity, but also with the tragicomic basics of mastering open-fire cookery and intrusions by insects and poisonous snakes. As she grows to understand the region and its people, her keen eye discerns the overwhelming scope of her task. Unable to plant trees faster than they are lost, she writes with moving clarity about her sense of powerlessness.

Combating deforestation leads Cornett into an equally fierce battle against her own feelings of fear and isolation. Her journey to Panama becomes a parallel journey into herself. In this way, Heart of Palms is much more than a record of her Peace Corps service; it is also a moving environmental coming-of-age story and nuanced meditation on one village’s relationship to nature. When she returns home two years later, Cornett brings with her both skills and experience and a remarkable, newfound sense of confidence and mission.

Writing with rueful, self-deprecating humor, Cornett lets us ride along with her on a wave of naïve optimism, a wave that breaks not only on fear and intimidation, but also on tedium and isolation. Heart of Palms offers a bracing alternative to the romantic idealism common to Peace Corps memoirs and will be valued as a welcome addition to writing about the Peace Corps and environmental service.

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Helen Foster Snow

An American Woman in Revolutionary China

Kelly Ann Long

University Press of Colorado, 2006

Helen Foster Snow: An American Woman in Revolutionary China tells the story of a remarkable woman born in rural Utah in 1907, who lived in China during the 1930's and became an important author, a lifelong humanitarian, and a bridge-builder between the United States and China.

As Kelly Ann Long recounts in this engaging biography, Helen Foster Snow immersed herself in the social and political currents of a nation in turmoil. After marrying renowned journalist Edgar Snow, she developed her own writing talents and offered an important perspective on emerging events in China as that nation was wracked by Japanese invasion, the outbreak of World War II, and a continuing civil war. She supported the December Ninth Movement of 1935, broke boundaries to enter communist Yenan in 1937, and helped initiate the "gung ho" Chinese Industrial Cooperative movement.

Helen Foster Snow wrote about the people and events in China's remote communist territories during an important era. She relayed detailed portraits of female communist leaders and famous figures such as Mao Zedong and Zhu De, as well as common people struggling to survive in a period of increasing turmoil. Her informed, compassionate depictions built a bridge linking American interest to the welfare of the Chinese.

Long's account recovers the story of a controversial and important commentator on a critical period in U.S.-China relations and in Chinese history

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Hemingway’s Second War

Bearing Witness to the Spanish Civil War

Alex Vernon

University of Iowa Press, 2011

In 1937 and 1938, Ernest Hemingway made four trips to Spain to cover its civil war for the North American News Alliance wire service and to help create the pro-Republican documentary film The Spanish Earth. Hemingway’s Second War is the first book-length scholarly work devoted to this subject.

Drawing on primary sources, Alex Vernon provides a thorough account of Hemingway’s involvement in the Spanish Civil War, a messy, complicated, brutal precursor to World War II that inspired Hemingway’s great novel For Whom the Bell Tolls. Vernon also offers the most sustained history and consideration to date of The Spanish Earth. Directed by Joris Ivens, this film was a landmark work in the development of war documentaries, for which Hemingway served as screenwriter and narrator.

Contributing factual, textual, and contextual information to Hemingway studies in general and his participation in the war specifically, Vernon has written a critical biography for Hemingway’s experiences during the Spanish Civil War that includes discussion of the left-wing politics of the era and the execution of José Robles Pazos. Finally, the book provides readings ofFor Whom the Bell Tollsboth in historical context and on its own terms.

Marked by both impressive breadth and accessibility, Hemingway’s Second War will be an indispensible resource for students of literature, film, journalism, and European history and a landmark work for readers of Ernest Hemingway.

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Holiday in Mexico

Critical Reflections on Tourism and Tourist Encounters

Dina Berger and Andrew Grant Wood, eds.

Duke University Press, 2009

With its archaeological sites, colonial architecture, pristine beaches, and alluring cities, Mexico has long been an attractive destination for travelers. The tourist industry ranks third in contributions to Mexico’s gross domestic product and provides more than 5 percent of total employment nationwide. Holiday in Mexico takes a broad historical and geographical look at Mexico, covering tourist destinations from Tijuana to Acapulco and the development of tourism from the 1840s to the present day. Scholars in a variety of fields offer a complex and critical view of tourism in Mexico by examining its origins, promoters, and participants.

Essays feature research on prototourist American soldiers of the mid-nineteenth century, archaeologists who excavated Teotihuacán, business owners who marketed Carnival in Veracruz during the 1920s, American tourists in Mexico City who promoted goodwill during the Second World War, American retirees who settled San Miguel de Allende, restaurateurs who created an “authentic” cuisine of Central Mexico, indigenous market vendors of Oaxaca who shaped the local tourist identity, Mayan service workers who migrated to work in Cancun hotels, and local officials who vied to develop the next “it” spot in Tijuana and Cabo San Lucas. Including insightful studies on food, labor, art, diplomacy, business, and politics, this collection illuminates the many processes and individuals that constitute the tourism industry. Holiday in Mexico shows tourism to be a complicated set of interactions and outcomes that reveal much about the nature of economic, social, cultural, and environmental change in Greater Mexico over the past two centuries.

Contributors. Dina Berger, Andrea Boardman, Christina Bueno, M. Bianet Castellanos, Mary K. Coffey, Lisa Pinley Covert, Barbara Kastelein, Jeffrey Pilcher, Andrew Sackett, Alex Saragoza, Eric M. Schantz, Andrew Grant Wood

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How Sweet the Sound

Music in the Spiritual Lives of Americans

David W. Stowe

Harvard University Press, 2004

Musical expression is at the heart of the American spiritual experience. And nowhere can you gauge the depth of spiritual belief and practice more than through the music that fills America's houses of worship. Most amazing is how sacred music has been shaped by the exchanges of diverse peoples over time. How Sweet the Sound traces the evolution of sacred music from colonial times to the present, from the Puritans to Sun Ra, and shows how these cultural encounters have produced a rich harvest of song and faith.

Pursuing the intimate relationship between music and spirituality in America, Stowe focuses on the central creative moments in the unfolding life of sacred song. He fills his pages with the religious music of Indians, Shakers, Mormons, Moravians, African-Americans, Jews, Buddhists, and others. Juxtaposing music cultures across region, ethnicity, and time, he suggests the range and cross-fertilization of religious beliefs and musical practices that have formed the spiritual customs of the United States, producing a multireligious, multicultural brew.

Stowe traces the evolution of sacred music from hymns to hip-hop, finding Christian psalms deeply accented by the traditions of Judaism, and Native American and Buddhist customs influenced by Protestant Christianity. He shows how the creativity and malleability of sacred music can explain the proliferation of various forms of faith and the high rates of participation they've sustained. Its evolution truly parallels the evolution of American pluralism.

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How We Live

An Economic Perspective on Americans from Birth to Death

Victor Fuchs

Harvard University Press, 1983

Victor Fuchs, author of Who Shall Live?, cuts through the hand wringing and the “pop” panaceas for America's current social crises in a brilliant analysis of the way we live. The facts are familiar. A doubled rate of divorce. A birth rate cut nearly in half while the percentage of illegitimate births nearly tripled. The young face dismal job prospects, and many of the old are totally dependent on the federal government.

Fuchs's economic approach shows us that the societal upheaval of American life is not created by fiat but rather emerges as millions of men and women make seemingly small choices that are constrained by their circumstances: “Should I go back to school?” “How many children should we have?” “When should I retire?” In a masterly synthesis, he shows the interrelatedness of our choices regarding family, work, health, and education throughout the life cycle. He uses the latest facts of American life to explore three major themes—the fading family, the impact of simple demographics on individual destiny, and the effect of weighing present and future costs and benefits on individual choice.

Fuchs concludes by offering innovative solutions to many contemporary problems: social security, health insurance, child care, youth unemployment, and illegitimate births. Moving beyond the outworn orthodoxies of liberalism and conservatism, he offers a clearer view of our circumstances so that readers from all walks of life can make better private choices, and contribute to more effective public policies.

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