Voices from the Peace Corps: Fifty Years of Kentucky Volunteers (review)

As reflected in its cover photograph of a Peace Corps volunteer (PCV) walking hand-in-hand with a young Malawi girl named Memory, Voices from the Peace Corps: Fifty Years of Kentucky Volunteers centers on oral histories. It offers no oral history theory or analysis of the construction of the narratives but uses the stories to illuminate both the enjoyable and the unpleasant aspects of the PCV experience. When long sections of the interviews are quoted, the excerpts are printed in a different font from the rest of the text to highlight their status as personal narrative. Shorter quotations remain in the same typeface as the rest of the sentence or paragraph. However, the authors do not include any indication (ellipses, brackets) of the editing that polished the quotations or any pauses or filler words from the original interviews.

The book is divided into eleven chapters plus a few supplemental sections. Following a chronological arrangement, Angene Wilson and Jack Wilson trace PCV experiences over the past fifty years, from the first time individuals discovered the Peace Corps organization through the application process, to country assignment, life, and work as a PCV, to returning to the U.S. after service. They then examine the lives and life work of returned PCVs years later. The postscript immediately following chapter 11 adds the authors' own Peace Corps experiences, organized into sections corresponding to the main chapters, to the collection of one hundred oral histories of returned PCVs included in the book.

The appendix, titled "Interviewee Information," lists all one hundred interviewees included in this project. The authors conducted the majority of the interviews themselves, but they also drew on archived interviews from previous projects in which the interviewees discussed their Peace Corps experiences. Placing this section at the beginning of the book would better serve the reader before being confronted with a deluge of names, countries, and dates in the first few chapters. The appendix list is arranged by the interviewer and subgrouped according to the decade in which the individual PCV served. Additional information provided on each PCV is the country or countries he or she served in, the years served, and program of service. Without any other identifying details in either this list or the main chapters, many of these people remain just names with countries and years of service. The PCVs therefore are supporting evidence for the authors' claims throughout the book, which does not bring them or their stories to life on the page or fully distinguish one from another. In fact, the authors repeatedly move from one individual to the next without facilitating the transition, so that the reader has to pause and think about which PCV the authors are discussing in that particular sentence. Perhaps the intention of Wilson and Wilson was to record PCV experiences as simultaneously specific and general, but this confusion also speaks to the pitfalls of trying to include all one hundred interviews in a single book.

On the other hand, each chapter begins with a section titled "Six Volunteers in Five Decades," which familiarizes the reader with six specific narratives. Each of the eleven chapters is devoted to one aspect of the Peace Corp experience, such as the decision to apply, the application process, training, and coming home. The same six PCVs, one experience for each decade since the founding of the Peace Corps, are singled out throughout the book in these chapter sections as illustrative oral histories heading each chapter. (One of the narratives is that of a couple, accounting for the six experiences in five decades.) In their preface, Wilson and Wilson state that the purpose of these excerpts is to give the reader the option of following an individual's entire Peace Corps narrative chapter to chapter and topic to topic. The reader also has the option of following the book in a sequence of his or her choosing as opposed to reading each...