PARTISAN REVIEW
5U
humor of the situation: a Peace Corps which brought no peace, and
isolated, inept young Americans without the dollars which many coun–
tries expected.
The difficulty with this otherwise good book is that it succeeds as
a story about the Peace Corps, but fails as autobiography. There is a
sameness in the personal story, although the author notes that he changes
his mind at various points, from private school, through college, in Israel,
in the South, and in Ecuador.
It
is hard to believe, however, that this
is the story of the making of an un-American, for Cowan's attitudes
at
Choate were as alienated as in Colombia; he was always, in one way or
another, "un-American," because he winced at racial slurs and struggled
to combat his own failure to respond to such attacks. Indeed, this strug–
gle is the central theme of the book, until Cowan finally succeeds in
forcing the Peace Corps to answer his charges of racism.
Cowan's search was for a kind of moral purity, which is one char–
acteristic odyssey of the sixties. What he wanted from Peace Corps volun–
teers was that they live up to the evangelical uplift with which the pro–
gram was endowed by President Kennedy. Cowan simply could not get
along with other volunteers, nor ultimately could he see them as victims
of the racist society from which they came. His most radical action in
Ecuador was to attempt a boycott by American personnel of a super–
market that discriminated against Ecuadorians, as
if
this was really an
important project for a foreign community whose purpose in being
there in the first place, as Cowan admits, was to exploit the Ecuadorians.
In the end, this is not a book about the making of an alienated
American, nor, as Cowan seems
to
say, the confirmation of a radical.
Although he strikes out at America with the passion of a moral reformer
and writes a compelling story of his experiences in the Peace Corps, he
does not begin to conceive of changing America or Americans. The
same, democratic America he endorses at the end, sounds like an
afterthought.
James Gilbert
