Author - John Coyne

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Gene Stone (Niger 1974-76) Tells Secrets Of Health
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Remembering JFK At U-M
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Tom Hayden speech at University of Michigan
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My Favorite Mad Man: Harris Wofford, Part Five
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PeaceCorpsWorldWide.Org Recognized By Westchester, NY Newspaper
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UNLV Creative Writing Program Featured In The Writer
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50 Years after Kennedy proposed the Peace Corps — article in Chicago Tribune
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More On The U-Michigan Peace Corps Week
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How To Write A How-To Novel
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Get ready for The 50th — Order Meisler's book now
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My Favorite Mad Man: Harris Wofford, Part Four
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Joshua Berman Publishes Two New Books On Nicaragua
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The Peace Corps Returns To Sierra Leone Video
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My Favorite Mad Man: Harris Wofford, Part Three
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September 2010 books by Peace Corps writers

Gene Stone (Niger 1974-76) Tells Secrets Of Health

New York Times bestselling author Gene Stone (Niger 1974-76) has a new book, The Secrets of People Who Never Get Sick, published by Workman and out this October.  Gene’s book tells the stories of twenty-five people who each posses a different secret of excellent health–a secret that makes sense and has a proven scientific underpinning. Three of the twenty-five come from RPCVs. Nate Halsey (Senegal 1996-98) credits cold showers; Sydney Kling (South Africa 2001-03) believes in friendships; and  Phil Damon (Ethiopia 1963-65), an old friend of mine and fellow teacher with me at the Commercial School in Addis Ababa, back in the day, swears on detoxification for a long and happy life. In writing this book, Gene underwent dozens of treatments from hypnotherapy to biofeedback, rolfing to Ayurvedic herbal rejuvenation. Gene is the co-author, most recently, of The New York Times bestseller The Engine 2 Diet, and his articles and columns have . . .

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Remembering JFK At U-M

[An online magazine for alumni and friends of U-M has a great piece about what is happening at the University of Michigan this week. Check out Joe Serwach story below. He writes for the U-M news service, and also watch the promotional: “The Passing of the Torch” on Youtube.com Thanks to Andy Trincia ( Romania 2002-04) for sending this along to me.] Joe Serwach writes: From John F. Kennedy to Barack Obama, presidents have challenged University of Michigan students to change the world. In Kennedy’s case, the transformation was rapid and enduring: The Peace Corps was born. “It was 50 years ago that a young candidate for president came here to Michigan and delivered a speech that inspired one of the most successful service projects in American history,” Obama told U-M graduates May 1. “And as John F. Kennedy described the ideals behind what would become the Peace Corps, he issued a challenge . . .

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Tom Hayden speech at University of Michigan

50TH ANNIVERSARY OF THE PEACE CORPS CELEBRATION OCT. 14, 2010 Speech by Tom Hayden It happened here, and it can happen again. The difference between 1960 and 2008 (sic) is that students and young people in the earlier time couldn’t vote. But we could march, and we did in Ann Arbor in support of the southern student sit-in movement. And we could imagine, propose reforms, and believed the politicians might heed the call. Sargeant Shriver called the Peace Corps creation a case of spontaneous combustion. It would have been a stillborn idea were it not “for the affirmative response of those Michigan students and faculty,” and “without a strong popular response he would have concluded that the idea was impractical or premature.” If it was spontaneous combustion, there had to be igniters and inciters. I became the editor of the Daily in the summer of 1960. I hitchhiked and to . . .

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My Favorite Mad Man: Harris Wofford, Part Five

Harris Wofford also dropped by our Training program at Georgetown University. Sometimes early in the day, before seven a.m., he would arrive with his oldest son, who was then about 10, and they would do the morning exercises with the ‘guys’ up on the playing field behind the college dorms. In the years since our Training days, that field became the site of the new Georgetown Hospital. Wofford  would also come to Georgetown when we were having someone famous speaking to us. Chester Bowles, then the Secretary of State, addressed us, as did the former governor of Michigan, Soapy Williams, who was Kennedy’s Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs.  I remember Wofford best from small sessions we had with him late in the evening and sitting around a college conference table. For the life of me, I can’t recall how or why those sessions came about, nor why I was in them. Perhaps Harris was having many other small . . .

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PeaceCorpsWorldWide.Org Recognized By Westchester, NY Newspaper

NEW ROCHELLE – When Peace Corps volunteers return from teaching English, fighting disease or designing irrigation systems, they have one more job to do: tell the story. Volunteers are expected to share what they learned about the people and cultures they came to know during their two years abroad. Pelham resident John Coyne, an author, blogger and former volunteer in Ethiopia, has made it his mission to help them do so. Coyne edits a busy website called Peace Corps Worldwide, where volunteers share their experiences through a network of blogs. The site grew out of a newsletter Coyne created with Marian Haley Beil in 1987 and a smaller website that launched in 1999. Peace Corps Worldwide launched four years ago, with Coyne as editor and Haley Beil as publisher. There are more than 200,000 former Peace Corps volunteers, and they’ve produced a kind of subgenre of the travelogue. By living . . .

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UNLV Creative Writing Program Featured In The Writer

The November issue of The Writer carries a short piece on the best Niche MFAs, 10 programs with a specialty focus. One listed is the MFA in creative writing with international emphasis at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas (UNLV). This creative writing program was started by novelist Richard Wiley (Korea 1967-69) author of half a dozen novels including Soldiers in Hiding that won the PEN/Faulkner Award in 1986. Wiley is also the Associate Director of the Black Mountain Institute, an International Center for Creative Writers and Scholars at UNLV. (The BMI is hosting this Thursday, October 14, at 7 pm in the Beam Music Center Doc Rando Recital Hall “Writing the World: American Authors Looking Outward” with Peter Hessler (China 1996-98); Paul Theroux (Malawi 1963-65); Mary-Ann Tirone Smith (Cameroon 1965-67); and Marnie Mueller (Ecuador 1963-65). The event is free and open to the public. If you can attend, go early to . . .

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50 Years after Kennedy proposed the Peace Corps — article in Chicago Tribune

[This article appeared today, 10-10-2010, in the Chicago Tribune. It was written by John Keilman, a Tribune reporter. As of today I am not seeing signs that the agency understands that the 50th is a great recruitment opportunity. The Peace Corps, of course, is allowed to spend money to recruit, but my guess is that they are afraid of the IG’s office, and the Peace Corps lawyers — a bunch of hanger-ons from the Bush years — who will slap their hands for using the lives and experiences of RPCVs to ‘sell’ the idea that the Peace Corps was worthy once, and is still worthy today. Of course these lawyers, and others key people in the Peace Corps administration, never were PCVs, and they do not have a feel for the organization. They just want jobs! I’m sure they are also afraid to volunteer and live the life of a PCV.) Articles such as this one will . . .

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More On The U-Michigan Peace Corps Week

At the Ann Arbor City Council meeting on October  4, 2010, the council agreed to close – State Street, from South University to East William – in connection with the 50th anniversary celebration of the founding of the Peace Corps. There will be two events on October 14, 2010, one of them in the early morning, to mark the exact anniversary of the 2 a.m. speech by John F. Kennedy from the steps of the Michigan Union. The later event, at 11 a.m. will include as guest speakers  Sen. Harris Wofford, Jack Hood Vaughn, Aaron Williams, Julia Darlow, Mary Sue Coleman and Jennifer Granholm. The council voted unanimously to approve the street closing.

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How To Write A How-To Novel

Reading a review of Philip Roth’s Nemesis by J.M. Coetzee in the October 28, 2010, The New York Review of Books, I came across a paragraph, and a piece of good advice, that we can benefit from as writers. Coetzee is writing about Roth’s way of providing “how-to’s” in his novels. “Among the subsidiary pleasures Roth provides,” Coetzee writes, “are the expert little how-to essays embedded in the novels: how to make a good glove, how to dress a butcher’s display window.” In his novel, Everyman, for example, Roth has a “modest but beautifully composed little ten-page episode of how to dig a grave.” In other words, the reader comes away from a book by Roth not only being impressed by the story, his language, but also with new knowledge. It is perhaps an old prose trick, but it works. Give the reader something new to chew on. Telling a story, . . .

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Get ready for The 50th — Order Meisler's book now

SINCE ITS INAUGURATION, the Peace Corps has been an American emblem for world peace and friendship. Across the nation, there are 200,000 returned Volunteers — including members of Congress and ambassadors, novelists and university presidents, television commentators and journalists. Yet few Americans realize that through the past nine presidential administrations, the Peace Corps has sometimes tilted its agenda to meet the demands of the White House. In his soon-to-be-released book, When the World Calls: The Inside Story of the Peace Corps and Its First Fifty Years [Beacon Press 2011], Stanley Meisler discloses, for instance, how Lyndon Johnson became furious when Volunteers opposed his invasion of the Dominican Republic; he reveals how Richard Nixon literally tried to destroy the Peace Corps, and he shows how Ronald Reagan endeavored to make it an instrument of foreign policy in Central America. But somehow the ethos of the Peace Corps endured. In the early . . .

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My Favorite Mad Man: Harris Wofford, Part Four

That summer in Washington changed my life. It changed all our lives in one way or the other, but in most respects it was a peaceful few months. We were back on a college campus; we were living a simple routine of early morning exercises, breakfast, classes, lectures, and beers in a bar late at night. We had some money in our pockets, and we had little responsibility. It was a lovely time, and those of us who might worry, worried about being de-selected, not that we knew much about that process. We all thought we were going to Africa once this silly Training thing was over. For the most part it was vacation time. Only after two years in Addis Ababa, coming back and working for the agency, and going to Training sessions for new Volunteers to Ethiopia, did I find Training useful. Now, I knew, something about the Empire, and how to put into . . .

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Joshua Berman Publishes Two New Books On Nicaragua

Joshua Berman and Randy Wood (Nicaragua 1998-2000) are two very successful RPCV travel writers. Josh was interviewed last month by TravelWriting 2.0 by Tim Leffel and one of the questions I think you’ll find interesting is: How did you “break in to travel writing”? What have been the keys to your success? The first step was joining the Peace Corps and being assigned to a beautiful tropical country on the verge of tourism with no useful guidebooks. My coauthor, Randy Wood, and I sent a proposal to Moon. We told them we were going to write the first comprehensive guide to Nicaragua and we wanted to do it for them. They gave us the job, then a few years later, they offered me Moon Belize when the original writer (Chicki Mallan) retired. Josh’s travel articles have appeared in the New York Times, National Geographic Traveler, Budget Travel, The Boston Globe, Yoga Journal, . . .

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The Peace Corps Returns To Sierra Leone Video

The NBC video featuring the 37 new PCVs in Sierra Leone was finally telecast on the NIGHTLY NEWS last evening. It was extremely well done and included references to the first group that arrived back in the early ’60s and had interviews with a few of the volunteers who were shown in their assigned locations. Below is the web link sent by Jim Sheahan (Sierra Leone 1961-63) http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/39151931/ns/nightly_news-making_a_difference/

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My Favorite Mad Man: Harris Wofford, Part Three

On those hot and humid evenings in Georgetown during Training when there wasn’t an evening lecture at the Hall of Nation, we would walk down the hill to the college bars on K Street and sit around telling lies about our lives back home, or we would walk along the shady cobblestone streets of the old section of Washington, with its clapboard small houses, and stone mansions built close to the sidewalk and find a party going on. There were always parties going on, kids working for the government, young bureaucrats. We weren’t like them. We were living on the edge, or so we fantasized that about ourselves; we weren’t finding safe jobs at home  nor settling down with careers. And on those hot summer evenings guys and gals would be standing outside their group houses with bottles of beer in hand, smoking cigarettes, catching a bit of breeze. Walking by, we’d paused and say hello, or step through an open gate, . . .

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September 2010 books by Peace Corps writers

Runes of Iona by Robert Balmanno (Benin 1973–75) Regent Press $15.95 349 pages August 2010 • Exhaust the Limits: The Life and Times of a Global Peacebuilder by Charles “Chic” F. Dambach (Colombia 1967–69) Apprentice House $18.95 314 pages November 2010 • A Voter’s Handbook: Effective Solutions to America’s Problems by James P. Gray (Costa Rica 1966–68) The Forum Press $17.95 200 pages May 2010 • You Are Invited To Serve: A Black American Peace Corps Volunteer Serves in Swaziland by Joseph Green III (Swaziland 1987-89; PC Staff: Jamaica APCD 1991–94) iUniverse $23.95 365 pages April 2010 • Being First: An Informal History of the Early Peace Corps by Robert Klein (Ghana 1961-1963) Wheatmark, Inc. $19.95 162 pages September 2010 9781604944570 • No Hurry in Africa: Life as a Peace Corps Volunteer in Kenya (Peace Corps memoir) by Theresa Munanga (Kenya 2004-07) iUniverse $15.95, $9.99 e-book 168 pages August 2010 • . . .

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