Archive - April 25, 2018

  Another* page-turner by David Mather! • Raw Dawgin’ by David J. Mather (Chile 1968–70) Peace Corps Writers March 2018 380 pages $14.95 (paperback) Reviewed by Carl M. Gallegos Raw Dawgin by David Mather is a fascinating tale about the interactions — sometimes volatile and other times heartwarming — between commercial fishermen and recreational boaters and sports fishermen seeking to enjoy the pleasures of modern day Florida. Add drug cartel mafiosos and retired law enforcement undercover agents to the mix, and you have an exciting and thoroughly entertaining story. Mather has skillfully woven in many players — long time blue collar residents and fun-seeking recent arrivals — who one can find in present-day Florida. The reader can almost smell the salt air and sense the many “critters” found in the “piney woods” and cypress swamps of Florida’s Gulf Coast. I highly recommend this book to anyone looking for a fun read! . . .

  Magic Hours: Essays on Creators and Creation by Tom Bissell (Uzbekistan 1996) Vintage — Reissue edition 352 pages March 2018 $16.95 (paperback), $11.99 (Kindle)   Reviewed by Dan Campbell (El Salvador, 1974-77) • TOM BISSELL IS AN AWARD WINNING writer from Escanaba, Michigan. He studied English at Michigan State University and in 1996, Bissell joined the Peace Corps and served for seven months with the Peace Corps in Uzbekistan. In an interview in BookBrowse, Tom describes how illness and personal crisis forced him home early and states that his experience in Uzbekistan “was extremely haunting for me personally and I felt I had really failed the people I joined the Peace Corps to help.” Magic Hours is a thoughtful collection of eighteen essays. In the introduction, he states that “to create anything, whether a short story or a magazine profile or a film or a sitcom, is to believe, . . .