Archive - December 23, 2009

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The Peace Corps Launches Digital Library
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Review: Bryant Wieneke's (Niger 1974-76) new thriller
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RPCV Martha Cooper (Thailand 1962-64) Amazing Book
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The Curious Case of Peace Corps Evaluator Mark Harris

The Peace Corps Launches Digital Library

The new Peace Corps Director, Aaron Williams, has just announced the launching of the Peace Corps’ Digital Library, a searchable collection of electronic Peace Corps materials from 1961 to today. He wants RPCVs and PCVs to send in narratives and photographs to the library. The Digital Library, Aaron says, ” will be a a living collection that represents the agency’s legacy of public service.” He is asking that RPCVs and PCVs contribute up to five photos and one story to the Digital Library via online submission forms. The way that it is set up is that visitors can either browse the individual collections or search by keyword, the host country name, or a specific period of time. At the moment the Digital Library is very much a work in progress, and will not be as comprehensive  as the collections at the National Archives and the Kennedy Library. If you want to find out more about . . .

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Review: Bryant Wieneke's (Niger 1974-76) new thriller

Bryant Wieneke is an assistant dean at a California university and has self published several novels. The latest, The Mission Priority, is the third in that series. A fourth will soon be published and a fifth is now being written. “It became a vehicle,” says Wieneke. “The two main characters have opposite foreign policy objectives.”  This latest book is reviewed by the intellectual tag-team of Lawrence Lihosit (Honduras 1975–77) and his son, Ezequiel. The first in this series by Wieneke, Priority One, was reviewed in 2005 on Peace Corps  Writers by David Gurr (Ethiopia 1962–64). • The Mission Priority by Bryant Wieneke Peace Rose Publishing 2009 335 pages $10.00 Reviewed by Lawrence  (Honduras 1975–77) and Ezequiel Lihosit Do you miss the Bush era colored coded paranoia? I sure do. That was even better than building fallout shelters during the 1960’s. I only wish they had introduced some kind of anti-terrorist uniform with cool patches, maybe a . . .

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RPCV Martha Cooper (Thailand 1962-64) Amazing Book

Martha Cooper (Thailand 1963-65) taught English in Thailand before journeying by motorcycle from Bangkok to London, where she earned a degree in ethnology from Oxford. Then she settled down in New York and went to work as a staff photographer for the New York Post. It was during this time, in the late 1970s and early 1980s, that she began to shoot some of the most famous photographs in the world. She spent several years photographing elevated subway lines from empty lots the rooftops of buildings in a crime ridden South Bronx, capturing New York City’s state of urban decay.  She was also able to gain the confidence of some of the most respected artists of this inner city community, such as DONDI, DURO, and LADY PINK. Assuming great risk, Cooper accompanied artists to train yards and lay-ups capturing many significant moments in aerosol art history. Taking these photos, Martha and Henry Chalfant assembled, Subway Art, a book . . .

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The Curious Case of Peace Corps Evaluator Mark Harris

One afternoon back in 1963 novelist Mark Harris received a telephone call from Sargent Shriver inquiring whether he’d be interested in writing a special report about the Peace Corps. Mark gladly accepted, then waited five months while his loyalty and sanity were investigated (been there, done that), and then went overseas  to West Africa where he wandered around for ten days in a country he called ‘Kongohno’  and then wrote his one-and-only Evaluation Report for Charlie Peters. Mark Harris retells all this in a book entitled, Twentyone Twice published in 1966. The book has two sections. One is about getting through security, the second is about Africa. The fictional name that he used of the West African country he visited is Kongohno…I’m not sure of the actual country, but I believe it is Sierre Leone. Old timers in the Peace Corps might know the real name of the country Mark Harris  visited as a Peace Corps Evaluator in 1964. But who was Mark Harris and why did . . .

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