Ships In The Desert - Jeff Fearnside
Product Details:
Paperback : 144 pages
ISBN : 9781951631154
Cover Design: Gwen Grafft
About the Book:
In this linked essay collection, award-winning author Jeff Fearnside analyzes his four years as an educator on the Great Silk Road, primarily in Kazakhstan. Peeling back the layers of culture, environment, and history that define the country and its people, Fearnside creates a compelling narrative about this faraway land and soon realizes how the local, personal stories are, in fact, global stories. Fearnside sees firsthand the unnatural disaster of the Aral Sea -- a man-made environmental crisis that has devastated the region and impacts the entire world. He examines the sometimes controversial ethics of Western missionaries, and reflects on personal and social change once he returns to the States.
Ships in the Desert explores universal issues of religious bigotry, cultural intolerance, environmental degradation, and how a battle over water rights led to a catastrophe that is now being repeated around the world.
About the Author:
Jeff Fearnside is the author of the short-story collection Making Love While Levitating Three Feet in the Air, which won the 2005 SFWP Awards Program. He is also the author of the chapbook A Husband and Wife Are One Satan, winner of the Orison Chapbook Prize. His work has appeared in literary journals and anthologies such as The Paris Review, Los Angeles Review, Story, and many others.
“Part memoir, part travelogue, part manifesto, Jeff Fearnside’s Ships in the Desert unfolds in a series of vivid vignettes that bring the culture and history of Central Asia to life. The former Peace Corps volunteer demonstrates how exposure to a new culture enables us to see our own society more clearly, with greater understanding and honesty. I learned a lot from this engaging and valuable book.”
“Jeff Fearnside’s Ships in the Desert is haunted by the image of great fishing boats abandoned to the toxic desert by the retreat of the Aral Sea—an environmental catastrophe caused by the myopia and folly of the Soviet development of mass agriculture. Fearnside reveals the disaster’s terrible toll on the land, wildlife, ecosystems and people of Kazakhstan who will never again see the sea. In rich, searching essays that consider religion, history, morality, education and the role of a foreign teacher in a Muslim country, he shows us that we have much to learn from the realities of a country most Americans can’t find on a map, revealing how we are connected, and all responsible for living with integrity.”
“Through his experiences as a Peace Corps volunteer in Central Asia, Jeff Fearnside helps make clear what is to so many in the West a little known and mysterious part of our world. Part memoir, part scholarship, Fearnside explores environmental degradation and religious tensions, the powerful influence of a Soviet past on the present, and what it means to be a teacher in a foreign land. There is much in this book to be admired.”