How to Cook a Crocodile: A Memoir with Recipes - Softcover

Casting caution to the wind at the age of fifty, New York caterer and food writer Bonnie Lee Black decided to close her catering business and join the Peace Corps. Posted to the tiny town of Lastoursville in the thickly rainforested interior of Gabon, Central Africa, Bonnie taught health, nutrition, and cooking, in French, primarily to local African women and children. In the two years she served in Gabon, Bonnie developed her own healthy recipe for a purposeful life, made in equal measures of good food, safe shelter, meaningful work, and unexpected love. Like M.F.K. Fisher's classic, World War II-era book, How to Cook a Wolf, Bonnie's true stories comprise a lively, literary, present-day survival guide.

Bonnie Lee Black joined the Peace Corps at the age of fifty, after having been a writer/editor and chef/caterer in New York City for many years. She served in Gabon, Central Africa, as a Health and Nutrition Volunteer from 1996-98. Bonnie is the author of the memoir Somewhere Child, published by Viking Press in 1981. She has since written two memoirs about her recent work in Africa: How to Cook a Crocodile, and Patchwork: A Memoir of Mali. An honors graduate of Columbia University in New York, Bonnie also holds an MFA in Creative Writing from Antioch University in Los Angeles. She now teaches English and Creative Nonfiction writing at the University of New Mexico in Taos.