Archive - July 2011

Years On and Other Travel Essays Lawrence F. Lihosit (Honduras 1975–77) iUniverse May 2011 211 pages Paperback $18.95 Reviewed by Tony D’Souza (Ivory Coast 2000–02; Madagascar 2002–03) AFTER READING LARRY LIHOSIT’S COLLECTION, Years On and Other Travel Essays, I find myself scratching my head as to why the author subtitled his book “travel essays,” for it was certainly the wrong phrase to use. While these twelve well-crafted and engaging essays — spanning some thirty years of his adventures and work in such places as Mexico, Honduras, and Bolivia — do take us to many foreign locales, to label Lihosit’s experiences as”travel” would be to denigrate what he’s accomplished. Let Theroux claim the word “travel,” for that’s what he does: sips coffee on trains while scrimshawing cribbed and crotchety notes. Lihosit, on the other hand, should have used something like Essays of Reckless Immersion, Essays of Fomenting Revolution, Essays of Giving . . .

Every once in a while the Peace Corps produces a wonderful writer, and one of them is Kevin Lowther (Sierra Leone 1963-65). He is a former PC/HQ staffer, newspaper editor, and student of the agency who has written on African issues for the Washington Post, the Christian Science Monitor;  he is also the coauthor of Keeping Kennedy’s Promise: The Peace Corps,Unmet Hope of the New Frontier, published in 1978. I first met Kevin through the Volunteer in-country newsletter he edited while a PCV in Sierra Leone. I believe the newsletter was called The Tilley Lamp, and it would arrive (for some unknown reason!) in the Peace Corps Office in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. It was well written, informative, funny, and the best PCV newsletter produced during those early years of the agency. Now he has a new book The African American Odyssey of John Kizell: A South Carolina Slave Returns to Fight the Slave Trade in His African Homeland.  (Kevin . . .

Peace Corps Training, 1968 By Jerr Boschee (India 1968-70) January, 2011 . . . I’m listening to a series of Donovan songs from my iTunes archive and it’s carrying me back to my room in an Indian village long ago. I had a three-inch reel-to-reel tape of his music that I played over and over again on a clunky, battery-operated, table-top recorder, along with a dozen or so other tapes I’d inherited from a Peace Corps Volunteer who’d finished his term of service long before. The quality wasn’t great, but the music sure was: Richie Havens, Bob Dylan, Rolling Stones, Beatles, Jefferson Airplane, Simon & Garfunkel, Ray Charles, Mamas & Papas, Peter Paul & Mary . . . and of course The Doors. June, 1968 . . . A cluster of huts and small buildings in a campground in Temescal Canyon, nothing but craggy hillsides between the compound and the . . .

Smuggled By Christina Shea (Hungary 1990–92) Grove/Atlantic, Inc., Black Cat July 2011 256 Pages $14.00 Reviewed by Marnie Mueller (Ecuador 1963–65) CHRISTINA SHEA’S SMUGGLED IS a tale of the emotionally corrosive power of dictatorial societies. It is also the story of human resiliency in the face of repressive governmental policies. Christina Shea has done an estimable job of illustrating this dichotomy in her second novel, an austere political saga covering fifty years of political upheaval in Eastern Europe, more specifically, Hungary and Romania between 1943 and 1991, spanning World War Two, the Stalinist takeover, and the eventual collapse of Communism. In limpid, unadorned prose, Shea, follows Jewish Éva Farkas from the age of five when she is smuggled out of Hungary in a flour sack, over the border into Romania where she is renamed Anca Balaj, and begins her transformation under the protective identity of “Romanian internal refugee” in the . . .

Once a week or so I get a book in the mail sent by an RPCV. Usually I know the book is coming, or there is a letter inside the package, saying, “hi, I’ve written a book about my time in….” Yesterday, however, I got an oversize (9×12) beautiful book of text and photos entitled Colombia: Pictures & Stories from someone named Sandy Fisher (Colombia 1962-64). No explanation. No note. No nothin’ as my son use to say when he was six. Plus, it was autographed! Well, someone had scribbled “Sandy Fisher” on the title page, no date, no comment, no nothin’. (You’ve got to love Peace Corps Writers. They are surely not into self-promotion.) This “Sandy,” as I said, was a PCV in Colombia from 1962-64, first doing community development work in Tenjo, outside of Bogota. After one year there, he went to be a volunteer leader on the Caribbean . . .

Changing Places 07/21/2011 16:05 By GLENN C. ALTSCHULER  ‘It is said that in America, the money is in the pockets of the Jews and the brains are in the heads of the Chinese,’ a local official in Guizhou province tells Michael Levy, a Peace Corps volunteer. Before long, the man adds, America will fade away and China “will have one hundred years of glory. When the Jews begin to immigrate here, we will know we have won!” Levy nods, rests his head on a table, and falls asleep. It is not his first – nor will it be his last – awkward conversation about Jews, Judaism and the United States. In Kosher Chinese, Levy, who currently teaches at St. Ann’s School in Brooklyn, New York, recounts his experiences in 2005 and 2006 teaching English as a second language at Gui Da University in rural China. Up-close-and-personal, funny and, alas, occasionally . . .

Feathers: The Evolution of a Natural Miracle by Thor Hanson (Uganda 1993–95) Basic Books $25.99 336 pages 2011 Reviewed by Leita Kaldi Davis (Senegal 1993–96) THOR HANSON, A CONSERVATION BIOLOGIST, has written a scientific treatise on a subject that most of us never notice — feathers.  But you don’t have to be an ornithologist to consider reading this book, you just have to be curious. Bird watching is not always “for the birds.” Hanson writes that it is “. . . a dangerous trap, because the true wonder of birding lies in the watching, soaking up the fine details of plumage, behavior and habit. Even common birds do uncommon things, and every sighting is worth more than a glance and a tick on a checklist.” You might see something like “Snowy Sheathbills striding about, bent forward like tiny professors lost in thought.” The scope of this book would be daunting . . .