This book chronicles the live of a Peace Corps volunteer in Libya
in the late 1960s, including the first American account of living
through the revolution that brought Gaddafi to power. The author
moves from campus protests at the University of Washington in the
spring of 1968, to Peace Corps training in Utah and the Navajo
Nation in New Mexico, to living and teaching in an isolated village
in Libya, to a European summer vacation, to the revolution that led
to charges that Peace Corps volunteers were CIA agents, to
returning to the U.S. in October, 1969, to witness the anti-war
moratorium on the Capital Mall in Washington, D.C. The heart of the
story is the author's own evolving journey as a teacher, during
which time he began to question both the official curriculum of
English instruction and the broader purposes of teaching for
liberation. This is also a story about the author's education and
re-education in Libya as he struggles to learn the rules of
everyday life (including the rules of gender and sexuality) as a
stranger in the village, and as he begins to see and appreciate the
world through somewhat different eyes. Part of his education
involved a reconstruction of the history of the village in terms of
wave after wave off European colonizers----from the time of the
Romans, to the Italian fascist colonizers, to the liberation of the
village by the British chasing Rommel's troops across the desert,
to its decline, renaming, and reappropriation as an Arab village.
The author brings all this up to the late 1960s by describing the
role of U.S. foreign policy in the "development" of Libya in league
with global oil, and with the support of the largest air base
outside the continental U.S. near Tripoli. This is, finally a
coming of age story--about a young man who was desperately looking
for something to believe in and live for, and more pragmatically
looking for a way out of the draft and Vietnam, and out of an
America that seemed to be slipping into collective madness. It is a
story (like all coming of age stories) about setting off on a great
youthful journey of self-discovery, and a rekindling of the human
spirit. Audiences for this book include: college students
(undergraduate and graduate) in education, cultural studies, and
Arabic studies; former Peace Corps volunteers and those interested
in the Peace Corps and its history; readers interested in recent
developments in Libya looking for some historical perspective on
how Gaddafi came to power and why the revolution turned
anti-American; and all those interested in a first-hand account of
what America was like at the end of a decade ushered in with
Kennedy idealism and the Peace Corps. A powerful story of exile and
a search for home, Volunteers of America is the Odyssey of a
generation. Awakening to a world in flames, inspired by visions of
liberation erupting everywhere, Dennis Carlson heard the chords of
freedom echoing all around him and faced the question: Which side
are you on? Here is Carlson's poignant and still timely answer to
that question. - Bill Ayers, author of Fugitive Days and many other
books on education, Distinguished Professor of Education,
University of Illinois, Chicago.
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