White Cargo by Don Jordan and Michael Walsh
For much of Britain's poor in the colonial era, getting passage to the American colonies often meant
paying the cost of the voyage by selling themselves into bondage for a set amount of years. This was the ideal situation. According to the authors of White Cargo, the reality for indentured servitude was far worse. The colonies became a dumping ground for England's unwanted. Convicts from overcrowded jails, prisoners of war, prostitutes, and kidnapped children survived appalling conditions during the Atlantic crossing to essentially be sold and worked relentlessly, with any infraction an excuse to add extra time to their toil. Life was truly "nasty, brutish, and short" for these people.
I have only skimmed the surface of literature about indentured servitude in the colonial era and found much of the reading dry. This book turned out to be a fairly decent page turner and was certainly an eye-opener about the horrors that happened during Great Britain's purging of their undesirables. At first, I thought it was going to be a hackneyed revisionist tome, but apparently the authors did their homework, or at least had one heck of a good bibliography. For colonial history buffs mainly - a grisly part of the past, engagingly told.
(William Hicks, Information Services)


In 1993, Greg Mortenson failed in an attempt to climb to the summit of K2. On the way down, lost and separated from his guide, he wandered into a tiny village. The hospitality of the villagers, who shared their meager meals with him, made him determined to come back and to find a way to return their kindness. When he visited them again, he asked them to show him the local school. Embarrassed, they had to admit that there was no school building. The village children had to sit on the ground to study. The government of Pakistan did not provide a school building, and, since they had to share a teacher with another village, they had a teacher only three days a week. Mortenson was touched to see the children studying their lessons, disciplining themselves without any adult assistance. He became determined to provide a school building, supplies, and a teacher. Back in California, he worked as an emergency room nurse, saved every possible cent by living in his car, and laboriously wrote letters, using a rented typewriter, to ask everyone he could think of for financial assistance. 













