Voices from the Peace Corps: Fifty Years of Kentucky Volunteers by Angene Wilson, Jack Wilson (review)

BOOK REVIEWS 98 OHIO VALLEY HISTORY Voices from the Peace Corps: Fifty Years of Kentucky Volunteers Angene Wilson and Jack Wilson Angene and Jack Wilson have provided historians with a valuable service. Between 2004 and 2008, they collected the oral histories of eighty-four returned Peace Corps volunteers . The collective experience of the volunteers they interviewed spanned the entire existence of the Corps to date, from the early 1960s to the first decade of the twenty-first century, and represented service in more than fifty countries. The Wilsons, themselves both Peace Corps veterans, conducted the interviews in concert with the University of Kentucky’s Louie B. Nunn Center for Oral History, where future historians will no doubt find the collection crucial to understanding social movements and the social aspects of foreign policy in the post-1945 United States. Voices from the Peace Corps, which more closely resembles an edited volume of oral history interviews than a monograph, represents the Wilsons’ own attempt to distill their interviews into a narrative of Kentuckians’ participation in the Peace Corps. Condensing the chronologically and spatially diverse experiences of the interviewees represented in this book into a cohesive narrative would be a daunting task for even the most graceful authors. Unfortunately, the Wilsons do not quite succeed. Although their enthusiasm for their topic and compassion toward their interviewees is obvious and their content is often compelling, the book often suffers from questionable organization and presentation. There is merit in some of the organizational choices the Wilsons make. At the book level, for instance, the Wilsons arrange their content in an intriguing and effective fashion. They divide the chapters thematically, in an order that mimics the experience of a Peace Corps volunteer. Topics include volunteers’ motivations for joining the Corps, training, the difficulties of learning to live and work in a different culture, and the lasting impact of the Corps experience on volunteers’ notions of themselves and the global community. The progression of themes, from motivation to legacy of service, allows the Wilsons to present the Peace Corps experience as something that is simultaneously personal and shared by multiple people across space and time. Some chapters demonstrate how different the experience was for volunteers depending on the period of time and country in Angene Wilson and Jack Wilson. Voices from the Peace Corps: Fifty Years of Kentucky Volunteers. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2011. 416 pp. ISBN: 9780813129754 (cloth), $35.00. BOOK REVIEWS WINTER 2011 99 which they served. For instance, later volunteers remember being motivated more by the ways in which volunteering boosted their marketability to employers, and somewhat less by the idealism that inspired earlier volunteers. Similarly, variations in living conditions, training, and cultural adjustment become clear as volunteers from different decades and host countries discuss their experiences. At other times, however, the experiences recounted by volunteers seem so similar that they become repetitive. Excerpts in some chapters, such as in the chapter “Getting In,” seem to have been included merely because they depicted a different period or point of view, rather than because they offered any new insight into the volunteer experience. The Wilsons’ organization at the chapter level,however,ismuchlesseffective.Otherworks of collected oral histories, such as Remembering Jim Crow (2001) by William Chafe and others , and Catherine Fosl and Tracy E. K’Meyer’s Freedom on the Border (2009), have successfully navigated the difficult task of presenting a collection of oral histories by utilizing a clear organizational style. Generally, this involves authorwritten introductions to each chapter, followed by excerpts that illustrate the chapter’s themes. Here, the Wilsons intersperse their commentary among their excerpts almost haphazardly. Each chapter begins with excerpts from interviews with six volunteers across five decades, followed by additional excerpts and summaries of interviewees’ comments on the key themes of the chapter. Sometimes, the Wilsons present excerpts in paragraph quotation; other times they present them as blocked text. The result is not so much confusing as jarringly without momentum. Most unfortunate, the effect distracts the reader from the interviews, the true stars of the book. The Wilsons would have served their material better by allowing more of the interviews to stand on their own, apart from the editorial...