Archive - November 18, 2010

How to Cook a Crocodile: A Memoir with Recipes (Peace Corps memoir) by Bonnie Lee Black (Gabon 1996-98) Peace Corps Writers $15.99 448 pages October 2010 Review by Thurston Clarke (Tunisia 1968) I BEGAN How To Cook A Crocodile, an account of Bonnie Lee Black’s service as a Peace Corps health and nutrition volunteer in Gabon, expecting a literary and culinary homage to one of her heroes, and mine, the elegant essayist and early foodie M.F.K. Fisher, whose 1942 How To Cook A Wolf offered a bracing mixture of recipes promising appetizing meals despite the constraints of wartime rationing, peppered with commonsense wisdom for living a full and satisfying life. Black’s book turned out to be all of this, and much more. Fisher’s approach to food and life is best encapsulated by her statement, as she wrote in Wolf,“Since we must eat to live, we might as well do it . . .

Professor Profile: Charles Larson By Chris Lewis [Charles Larson is retiring from American University and was recently interviewed on campus by their student-run website. For those who don’t follow (closely) Peace Corps writers, Larson is an early published writer, mostly academic books, but also the novel, The Insect Colony, set in Nigeria, and published in 1978 by Holt, Rinehart. Charlie is best known in the academic world, here and overseas, for his work encouraging African writers and writing about their work. In this interview, published with the permission of the editor-in-chief of AWOL website, Charlie sums up his Peace Corps connection and his academic interests.]   American University’s second-longest teaching faculty member is retiring at the end of this year. Charles R. Larson is a pioneer in the study of African literature in the Western world. Chris Lewis, AWOL editor-in-chief and former Larson pupil, sat down with him to discuss his storied career. Next semester Larson will teach “The African . . .