The Handsome American: a fictionalized memoir

By E.B. Bolles

Two Peace Corps volunteers went to Africa in the mid-1960s. A lifetime later, one of them looks back on their story and as she does three themes are sewn together. First, she tells what it was like to be a Peace Corps volunteer when the organization was new and the idea of working alone in a remote part of the world seemed revolutionary? How did people raised in affluence react to a world without electricity, plumbing, and paved roads? What was it like to work with people from an entirely different background, people who did not even understand that the volunteers had come of their own accord?Hate versus Love is another of the themes. The volunteers expected to be welcomed, and mostly they were, but envy and cross-cultural confusion was also part of the mix. The narrator (Joyce) learns just how forceful hate can be, even when those hated have the most innocent of intentions.A third theme is time. As Joyce tells her story she realizes how much the world has changed since she was a young woman fresh out of college, eager for adventure and the hope of doing some good. Now she is in her 70s; the values and tastes that shaped her life in the 1960s have long faded from the scene. She is part of the present but also part of what used to be. Like everyone past 25 years of age, she lives in and remembers many worlds at once.The story is both a memoir and a fiction. It is fully a memoir of the 1960s and life in the Peace Corps, and it is the fictionalized telling of an incident that allows the author to explore the entanglement of cultures and dreams.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1520865082
• ISBN13: 9781520865089
• Release Date: November 2016
• Publisher: Independently published
• Length: 216 Pages
• Weight: 0.85 lbs.
• Dimensions: 9.0" x 0.5" x 6.0"