Society & Culture
101 Arabian Tales: How We All Persevered in Peace Corps Libya should be required reading for all Peace Corps volunteers and administrators once the 60-year-old federal agency resumes activity — it shut down because of COVID. Meanwhile, the book should also be recommended reading for everyone for what it says about an increasingly important and volatile region of the world. If Hobler had learned in 1968 from Peace Corps personnel and training materials what he writes about now, he would have been much better prepared to acclimate to Libyan culture and to teach English to fifth graders in the remote, impoverished village to which he was assigned. Then again, had he and his fellow volunteers NOT had to learn a lot on their own about Al Gala, an old Berber village 90 miles south of Tripoli — no electricity, no plumbing, significant differences from Western ways — the reader would have been deprived of a lively and instructive account. Because Hobler writes from the perspective of a 75-year