This anecdotal record of a young man's encounter with the Chinese and their way of life offers unique insights to readers. Salzman had majored in Chinese literature at Yale, and his first job after graduation in 1982 was teaching English to students and teachers at Hunan Medical College in Changsha. He met this considerable challenge with sensitivity, humor, and imagination, and was quickly regarded with respect and affection. Salzman had studied...

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,...

By honestly describing her difficult and gradual acceptance into the daily life of a West African rural community -- a world of herders, potters, subsistence farmers, diviners and initiates -- Carol Spindel renders a foreign culture with exceptional immediacy and emotional depth. She is especially drawn to the world of women, and her portraits of that world's beauty and hardship are extraordinary for their precision, warmth, and dramatic power. A...

NATIONAL BESTSELLER Taking up where his beloved A Year in Provence leaves off, Peter Mayle offers us another funny, beautifully (and deliciously) evocative book about life in Provence. With tales only one who lives there could know-of finding gold coins while digging in the garden, of indulging in sumptuous feasts at truck stops-and with characters introduced with great affection and wit-the gendarme fallen from grace, the summer visitors ever trying...

The author recounts his ten-year investigation into the life a twelfth-century Indian slave who lived in a remote corner of Egypt.

Seduced by the government's offer of 320 acres per homesteader, Americans and Europeans rushed to Montana and the Dakotas to fulfill their own American dream in the first decade of the twentieth century. Jonathan Raban's stunning evocation of the harrowing, desperate reality behind the homesteader's dreams strips away the myth-while preserving the romance-that has shrouded our understanding of our own heartland.

"Propelled by his boyhood passion for the Civil War, Horwitz embarks on a search for places and people still held in thrall by America's greatest conflict. The result is an adventure into the soul of the unvanquished South, where the ghosts of the Lost Cause are resurrected through ritual and remembrance. He joins "hardcore" reenactors; witnesses Klan rallies and calls for race war; finds that Andersonville Prison's commander, executed as a war criminal,...