Josh Swiller's THE UNHEARD: A MEMOIR OF DEAFNESS AND AFRICA - wow! What a great book this is. Swiller took a handicap, a disability, or whatever you want to call it, and turned it into this mesmerizing, funny, horrifying, beautiful book. It's all about his adventures as a Peace Corps volunteer in Zambia in the early 1990s. In the remote town of Mununga, Swiller finally found himself feeling at home, his deafness less of a problem than it had ever been. He worked at the local clinic with his newfound friend, Augustine Jere, and witnessed extreme poverty, malnutrition, dying babies, widespread disease in the rainy season, AIDS victims, young girls and women worn out from numerous pregnancies, and more.

Swiller has a sly and subtle sense of humor that saves him from what could have been a desperate and despairing situation. At one point, for example, he meets an ex-Army scout from neighboring Zaire, a refugee. Swiller asked what the man did in the army, and was told, "I killed people." Swiller reports that they became good friends. Sorry, but that made me chuckle. At one point he characterizes his tour in Zambia thusly -

"There was a saying in the Peace Corps during my time of service. Volunteers who go to South America come back to the States politically active, volunteers who go to Southeast Asia return spiritually aware and curious, and volunteers who go to Africa? - they come back drunk and laughing."

And yes, Josh does his share of drinking and laughing with his friend Jere and others. But Swiller's story of life in Mununga becomes gradually darker and darker. On Christmas Eve the town goes on a colossal drunk. There are brawls, a person dies. A mob of drunken vigilantes pursue the killer, who is cornered, captured, stripped, and dragged to his death, his body chopped and dismembered and thrown to the dogs. It's a horrifying sequence of events, causing Swiller to realize how close to the surface pure savagery can be. He tries to escape the horror by taking a vacation to Zanzibar with a woman, a fellow Peace Corps volunteer, but comes down with malaria, and has everything stolen. Later he is in a tragic and horrific bus accident, which leaves him in shock, tortured by survivor's guilt.

I'll say it again. Wow. This is a brutally honest book and one helluva read, and Josh Swiller is one very rare and talented writer. He has my utmost admiration and his book gets my highest recommendation. You wanna read a good book, one that will catch you up and keep you turning the pages late into the night? Read this one.

- Tim Bazzett, author of the memoir, BOOKLOVER ( )

A talented writer with an incredible story. This book will give you insight into an entirely new world, one most of us will never know. It will also make you laugh out loud, be grateful for where you live, and the friendships you have. A truly beautiful story and life well lived. ( )

Zambia. A problematic but potentially useful memoir. Swiller recounts his time in Zambia, where as a Peace Corps volunteer he appears to have violated ethical principles, flouted standards of cultural sensitivity and appropriateness, and generally been a cowboy. That Swiller is deaf raises interesting questions about intersections of disability, identity, and behavior issues. I say that the book is "useful" because I may teach with it in a service-related ethics class. ( )

An amazing book ( )

In the 1990s, Josh Swiller joined the Peace Corps and was sent to Africa to build a well. Born with significant hearing loss, Josh was mainstreamed (that is, sent to public school with hearing kids rather than to a Deaf school where he would have learned ASL). He can speak and read lips, but has always felt on the margins in a hearing world; he learned ASL at Gallaudet, but was not a part of the Deaf culture there, either. In Mununga, a practically forgotten village in Zambia, Josh finds that his hearing loss doesn't matter as much. There is less background noise to contend with, people face him to speak, and don't mind when he asks them to repeat themselves. But this small village is fearful and violent, and Josh soon finds out that building a well is the least of his worries.

I had a love/hate relationship with this memoir. The stories Josh tells are absolutely heartbreaking and maddening. I generally felt depressed about the state of Africa while reading - in the face of childhood diseases, AIDS, and fear as he describes, what hope is there? Also, I didn't particularly like Josh. His bullheaded way of trying to move projects forward grated on me, and I was annoyed rather than amused by his anecdote of "cultural exchange" via showing some of the locals the Sports Illustrated swimsuit edition. But he does know how to craft an exciting narrative, keeping me reading despite my misgivings and pacing his stories in such a way that I was hard put to find a good stopping point. ( )