THE HEMINGWAY BOOK CLUB OF KOSOVO
Paula Huntley, . . Putnam/Tarcher, $22.95 (236pp) ISBN 978-1-58542-211-1
Huntley's husband volunteered for an American Bar Association project in Kosovo to help create a new legal system in the fall of 2000, the year after NATO bombing had ended. With trepidation, Huntley decided to go, too, enrolling first in a crash course on the teaching of English as a second language so she'd have something to offer. On arriving in Prishtina, she volunteered at a language school and started keeping this diary. Her (mostly Albanian) students became her personal connection to everyday life in Kosovo; this diary, where she recorded her impressions, became her way of sharing Kosovo with the world. There are the usual funny details of life in a foreign country, e.g., the laboriously translated menu that offered "chicken buttocks on screwers." Before long, however, her students' stories take center stage: how they survived the Serb roundups, tortures and killings. As a taxi driver explained, "Some men are hard as stones." Teaching supplies are scarce, so it's serendipitous that the one American-language paperback that Huntley came across is a copy of Hemingway's
Reviewed on: 12/16/2002
Genre: Nonfiction
Open Ebook - 272 pages - 978-1-4406-8127-1
Paperback - 255 pages - 978-1-58542-293-7
Peanut Press/Palm Reader - 272 pages - 978-1-4406-8218-6