Here Buy This Book. Here to Buy This Book. In August 1961, two weeks after the Berlin Wall was built, a Pan Am propjet taxied onto the airport tarmac in the capital of Ghana. Into a world cleaved by the Cold War, the Peace Corps was born. Thirty-eight years later, more than 6,500 Peace Corps volunteers are at work.
Volunteers publish memoirs.
But now Elizabeth Cobbs Hoffman, professor of American Foreign Relations at San Diego State University, has written a thoughtful history setting the Peace Corps in its place and time. Like many a Peace Corps volunteer, Hoffman takes a while to feel comfortable with her task. Yet once she follows volunteers into the field, her story grows in the telling. The Peace Corps has had a quixotic journey. Its initial promise quickly got a cold shower of real life in the developing world.