The Village of Waiting

by George Packer

Overview

Back in print, the "masterful" (The New York Times Book Review) account of an American in West Africa

Now restored to print with a new Foreword by Philip Gourevitch and an Afterword by the author, The Village of Waiting is a frank, moving, and vivid account of contemporary life in West Africa. Stationed as a Peace Corps instructor in the village of Lavié (the name means "wait a little more") in tiny and underdeveloped Togo, George Packer reveals his own schooling at the hands of an unforgettable array of townspeople—peasants, chiefs, charlatans, children, market women, cripples, crazies, and those who, having lost or given up much of their traditional identity and fastened their hopes on "development," find themselves trapped between the familiar repetitions of rural life and the chafing monotony of waiting for change.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780374527808
Publisher:	Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Publication date:	08/01/2001
Edition description:	1ST FARRAR
Pages:	352
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.25(h) x 0.78(d)

About the Author

George Packer is an award-winning author and staff writer at The Atlantic. His books include The Unwinding: An Inner History of the New America (winner of the National Book Award), The Assassins’ Gate: America in Iraq, and Our Man: Richard Holbrooke and the End of the American Century (winner of the Hitchens Prize and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for biography). He is also the author of two novels and a play, and the editor of a two-volume edition of the essays of George Orwell.

Editorial Reviews

Lovely in its feeling for the people and realistic in its assessment of the African situations, this is a first-rate piece of social reportage.”—Irving Howe

“[A] fond and angry account...An impressively unself-righteous and questioning work of intimate introduction, in which each dislocation of hope and breakdown of sense matters. Truthful throughout.”—The New Yorker

“Glowing...A masterful book.”—The New York Times Book Review

From the Publisher